[Freegis-list] Re: [postgis-users] FOSS GIS suite project? (was Mandrake GIS)

[Daniel Morissette]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> 
> Well, I was envisaging a base package and then lots of add ons.  The base
> package would be "fat" and contain most of the support libraries that
> might ever be needed.
> 
> "virtual packages" seems to imply a greater degree of granularity then I
> was expecting to achieve.
> 

I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the beginning of this discussion, but I 
would like to add a few things:

- As I'm writing this, we (DM Solutions) are trying to come up with a 
clean way to distribute MapServer and its dependencies. So whatever you 
do please keep us in the loop, we'll be interested in working with you.

- We have been experimenting with RPMs until now and it's quite a 
nightmare to deal with all the dependencies we need without screwing up 
the target machine. MapServer and most open source GIS packages always 
want the latest of everything so we would have to package new or patched 
versions of many libraries and packages (Curl, PHP, even Apache, etc.) 
already distributed as part of the base OS (by RedHat or others)

- The idea of a "fat" base package may end up being the only viable 
solution, that's the way the MS4W package works on Windows for instance 
(http://maptools.org/ms4w/). That's probably what we'll have to do at 
the end, but I was hoping that we could leverage the package management 
mechanisms on each OS.

Could someone elaborate more about "virtual packages"?  Does this come 
with a formal configuration mechanism, or is this just a word you use to 
describe the concept of distributing multiple packages together?


> 
> I don't think sourceforge is the appropriate place to build the software.
> They don't like you using too much disk space, or doing much stuff on the
> main shell accounts.  And access to the compile farms is very ackward
> as well as having limits on disk space and so forth.
> 

> So, yes, I agree we need a server to build on that we can issue shell 
> accounts
> to a number of participants.  That will be key.  Once we have that we could
> start work pretty much right away.
> 

DM Solutions could offer a box dedicated to that if there is enough 
interest from serious developers.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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