Distribution Special Interest Groups

It has been proposed to create and promote a group of interest for distribution related issues. Main goals of this kind of initiative is raising the interest towards distributions (mainly GNU/Linux, but not limited to it) among upstream developers and create a stable and well-stated channel of communication between packagers and developers. Some aspects of distribution development and maintainance, as well as quality assurance practices are often quite obscure for many upstream developers indeed, but essential to ensure an easy approach to free GIS for naive or also advanced users.

Well known GNU/Linux distributions which have a GIS dedicated team are:


 * Debian
 * Ubuntu
 * Geolivre Linux

RPM-based distributions, such as Fedora Linux and SuSE Linux, do not have a dedicated GIS teams, but there are several parties maintaining independent RPM archives that could be persuaded to band their efforts together under the aegis of the foundation:


 * Mapping Hacks Fedora RPMs -- maintained by SchuylerErle
 * intevation.de Fedora RPMs
 * PostGIS RPMs for Fedora from Refractions Research
 * Mandriva and SuSe RPMs -- maintained by GDF Hannover

Unlike the Debian-GIS SIG, which already has mailing list / code repository infrastructure, the RPM-using community does not have such infrastructure and would benefit from hosting by OSGeo.

I (FrankW) propose we start two SIGs:


 * 1) A meta-packaging SIG with only a mailing list (perhaps metapkg@mail.osgeo.org) and this wiki space for discussion of packaging issues and upstream issues.  It would be open to packages for all platforms including things like debian/rpm packaging, MacOSX, Win32 (FWTools, MS4W), bootable CD distributios.
 * 2) An rpm-packaging SIG with a mailing listat OSGeo, and CVS services hosted elsewhere (Intevation GForge?) since it won't be a formal OSGeo project for a while.  This SIG would focus on producing RPMs for various packages, possibly focusing on Fedora Core initially.

I will create proper subpages for these shortly.