[DebianGIS-dev] Ping: Changes in Debian GIS Blend stuff

[Andreas Tille]

Hi again,

my mail[1] to pkg-grass-devel about more or less highjacking their
(orphaned) prepearation for metapackages in the Blends style did not
triggered any response.  The good news is that obviosely nobody is
against my action and so I consider the move of the GIS Blends stuff to

  svn://svn.debian.org/blends/projects/gis

as accepted.  IMHO it would be a good idea to remove the old stuff from
pkg-grass SVN and possibly set a svn:external property for those who
might wonder what happened.

The bad news about the missing response is that there is obviosely a
lack of interest from the GIS people in driving a Blend.  IMHO it would
be a really good idea to release Squeeze with some gis-* metapackages in
version 0.1.  I kept two obviosely interested people (maintainers of GIS
applications) form the Debian Med team in CC - they might support my
statement that the existence of the Debian Med project has drastically
improved Debian's relevance for the use in medical care and science.

So my idea is to give Debian a similar spin in GIS and I hope that
people would try to make the step from simply adding GIS applications to
the Debian package pool to start thinking in a Blend-ish which tries to
deliver a complete working environment for GIS experts, hobby GIS
adictives like OSM mappers etc.  My first step in this direction is to
provide the Blends tasks pages[2] (how these are maintained is explained
in my previous mail[1]).

Moreover I would recommend using a GIS team policy for packaging like we
did in the Debian Med team[3] to enable including more developers into
the team.

Finally the documentation for instance the DebianGis Wiki page[4] needs
probably an update (I just found at least one missing link to UbuntuGis).

I really hope that this mail gets some active response especially the
item about gis-* metapackages for Squeeze to make sure that GIS becomes
some visibility inside the large pool (or should I say the ocean) of
Debian packages and GIS users will favourise Debian over other distros
because of the first class GIS support.

Kind regards

        Andreas.

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2010-April/007258.html
[2] http://blends.alioth.debian.org/gis/tasks/
[3] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis

-- 
http://fam-tille.de