[DebianGIS-dev] maps / coastline files within Debian

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:12:02PM +0100, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am working on some packages for Debian Meteorology  
> (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Meteorology):
> magics++ , a plotting / graphics library / scripting system , and  
> zyGrib, a GRIB (met. format) file viewer.
> They both include some coastline maps from "gshhs"   
> (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/gshhs.html),
> the "Global Self-Consistent Heirarchical High-Resolution Shoreline  
> database. This data is GPL'd,
> created by the same people as "gmt".
>
> zyGrib contains 23M of "low-res" maps, with an additional package of 101  
> MB optional high-res maps.
> magics++ has 21 MB in one file from this set; the files are in their own  
> .b format. It makes sense to build these
> files into their own shared package.
>
> Now, it appears that these are the same data files in 'gmt' (Generic  
> Mapping Tools) a lower-res version of the coast files are provided
> in netCDF format in gmt-coast-low (5.5 MB worth). There was a  
> higher-resolution package gmt-coast-high, but this was removed as
> it took up too much space in Debian.
>
> Does anyone know this code? It appears as though the gmt-coast-low is  
> not sufficient for zyGrib and magics++,
> and I'm not familiar with the history of "gmt" beyond the README.  Any  
> ideas or recommendations as to how to proceed?
>

I don't know the cited programs, but gmt-coast-low currently includes a 
tiny script gmt-coastline-download to download and install medium and high-res coast
lines. If both programs use the same format for GSHHS you could simply
suggest downloading by the same script in your documentation. Note
that GMT coastlines format is quite known and used so i'm quite sure
you can provide eventually some helper script for possible format
conversions. 

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine