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

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 7:38 AM, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:
> 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 blends-style page looks nice. Thanks for your effort
>
> 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.

I don't really get the link between the projects success and the
presence of metapackages and/or a blend (in fact I even didn't know
that blends existed), it seems quite logical that succesful projects
can manage to find someone interested in creating such a blend.
I *do* believe having a discussion how debianGIS could attract more
people is interesting, so thanks for raising the issue.
I believe the only way to get more developers is to attract more
users, and giving them a chance to contribute in their own way, eg by
helping out people with gis problems on the mailinglist.

>
> 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]).

Perhaps we should collaborate more closely with the osgeo live cd team
- check which of their stuff can be included in debian instead of
added by them.

>
> 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.

Does anybody read policies? Adding a 'how to help' part in the wiki
seems useful, but having a 'policy for packaging'?

>