Adding build profiles to Debian GIS packages

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 23-01-16 04:36, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> I have recently been trying to get a couple of packages like spatiality
> and gdal build on sparc64 which turned out to be extremtely frustrating
> due to the circular dependency chain which seems to affect many of
> your packages.

Many of our packages? Do you have specifics, because I'm only aware of
two circular dependencies which only affect a small subset of our
packages (but include the most important ones)?

> Now, since the Debian tools recently added support for build profiles
> [1], I was wondering whether you could maybe add support for that
> to the relevant packages so that they can be easily bootstrapped for
> new architectures.

I don't have time to look into build profiles now, and I expect them to
only be useful in the sort terms until librt-topology can be used
instead of liblwgeom for spatialite. Motivating the rt-topology devs to
release seems more fruitful than investing time into build profiles that
won't be used long.

> The Haskell people recently were so kind to do that for their alex and
> happy packages which made bootstrapping a piece of cake.
> 
> I'd also be very happy to hear about any possible tricks which could
> help break the circular dependency that exists with your packages.

The circular dependencies were recently discussed in #808606, where I wrote:

"
 The spatialite->postgis->gdal->spatialite circular dependency is mostly
 problematic during geos transition on which all these packages depend.

 spatialite depends on postgis for the topology features in liblwgeom,
 these will be moved to a separate project (working title rt-topology)
 [0], which will remove the spatialite dependency on postgis/liblwgeom.

 With the new sfcgal dependency to enable 3D features in postgis we also
 have: postgis->sfcgal->openscenegraph->gdal->spatialite->postgis.

 Getting rid of liblwgeom dependency on spatialite should resolve that
 too.

 I'm not aware of upgrade problems caused by the current situation, if
 they exist and are common we should consider dropping the liblwgeom
 dependency already and live with the reduced functionality. But as far
 as I can tell that isn't the case.

 [0]
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-devel/2015-October/025376.html
"

For the geos transition I broke the circular dependency by first
building spatialite without liblwgeom support, as documented in:

 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=791045#76

Kind Regards,

Bas

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