UbuntuGIS team

Hi Jon,

Jon Saints wrote:
> Over the past month, I have been working with the
> debianGIS (http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl)
 > team to establish a more fluid relationship with the
 > UbuntuGIS group and to create updated GIS packages for
 > Ubuntu.

Yes, I'm tracking DebianGIS from the beginning.
A few months ago I moved to Ubuntu, just for the same reason as you 
mention below ;-) and here I'm new for UbuntuGIS.
So, please, could you give little overview what have you done in Debian 
GIS for DebianGIS and UbuntuGIS integration?

> My personal interest in in creating a "sync"
> of debianGIS respository for Breezy

Yes, but there are so many packages and - as I talk to Burgundavia and 
ogra in #ubuntu-devel yesterday - we need to decide a roadmap. We 
discussed my proposal and I will include it to UbuntuGIS wiki page 
tomorrow I think. In general, we need:
- to group pacakges in some logical meta-packages i.e. webmapping stuff
- define priorities between groups - meta-packages
- define priorities for packages insinde defined groups

Just a roadmap. Have you any suggestions?
Where to start, how to proceed in order to do best?

 > I like Ubuntu's release cycle. It will offer
> many people greater access to uptodate GIS software on
> regular basis. 

Definitely, agreed :-)

> DebianGIS is a very active group of debian
> developers/testers and GIS experts who are truly doing
> great work to put the best and most up-to-date open
> source GIS software into debian. I have found that
> porting their work to Ubuntu is very easy.

In fact, Debian is Ubuntu's father ;-)
BTW, who is the mother, hehe?

> DebianGIS already has:
> 1) packaged the most popular GIS apps like mapserver,
> grass, gdal etc
> 2) packaged very complicated packages like grass and
> postgis
> 3) Created a list of opensource packages that need to
> be built

Sure, and we need to adapt it to Ubuntu. But we still need an adaptation 
roadmap. Next, we need to go further and work on new features for 
UbuntuGIS, I think so.

> UbuntuGIS needs to be very careful not to reinvent or
> duplicate the efforts of the DebianGIS team. The
> debianGIS team is very efficient and expirienced. The
> most effective way for UbuntuGIS team to package
> uptodate GIS software for Ubuntu is to become
> contributors of patches and packages to debianGIS. 

Certainly, I agree. Note, as I said in one of my posts, I'm not a MOTU 
or very experienced deb developer and maintainer, but I agree and I'm 
trying still to lower my own the learning curve of packaging ;-)

> My vision for UbuntuGIS is this: We develop all GIS
> packages for debianGIS unstable repository.
 > Bugs and patches will be made for debian only. When we feel
 > that there are stable enough packages in the debianGIS
 > repository, it is easy enough to "sync" debianGIS
 > packages from source to the various Ubuntu Distros.

So, you propose to do it indirectly with help of DebianGIS repos.
 From my point of view there are some advantages but I'm not able to 
decide. Generally, agreed but I have one comment, that in some cases 
DebianGIS repos could be limiting us i.e. when we would want - 4xW ;-) -
to include latest versions of i.e. PostGIS or GDAL.

> Willing groups could set up testing repositories and
> work to integrate the Ubuntu packages into universe.

You mean MOTUs, right?

Cheers
-- 
Mateusz Łoskot
http://mateusz.loskot.net