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
 * Gentoo
 * Mandriva (not really a team but all relevant RPMs there and maintained)
 * Mandriva 2008 RPM (Osaka City University)

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:


 * Fedora Extra 6 (source RPMS and i386 binaries RPMS) contains a few GIS packages like GDAL, geos and proj
 * Fedora 7 (source RPMs and i386 binaries RPMs) contains a few GIS packages like GDAL, geos, proj and mapserver
 * 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
 * Mandriva CD ISO Image -- maintained by Osaka City University FOSS4G Team

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.