OSGeo4W

Introduction

This page discusses the OSGeo Binary Distribution (OSGeo4W) and Installer of software for MS Windows (aka Win32). It is a specific case of the OSGeo Binary Distribution.

Mailing List

• osgeo4w-dev@lists.osgeo.org (Subscribe, Archive)

Goals

General goals:

• Include a wide variety of OSGeo packages.
• Painless installation (exe/msi installer)
• Select desired packages only, and pull in dependencies automatically.

General Plan

Morph MS4W to use a nicer installer front end (instead of just zip files) and to include more packages.

Targetted Packages

In the following context committed means we are planning to include this item, and have someone willing to do the work. desired implies we are interested in including it, but no one is committed to doing it.

• MapServer (committed, Jeff)
  • MapServer CGI (committed, Jeff)
  • PHP MapScript (committed, Jeff)
  • Python MapScript (desired)
• GDAL (committed, Mateusz)
  • Python bindings (desired)
  • Perl bindings (committed, Ari)
  • Plugin Drivers: ECW, OCI, SDE, MrSID, etc (desired)
• PostGIS/Postgres (desired) (Mark Cave-Ayland?)
• pgAdminIII/phppgadmin (desired)
• Mapbender (desired)
• Mapbuilder (desired)
• OpenLayers (desired)
• WinGRASS (desired) (Moritz Lennert?) (Tcl/Tk)
• Qt (desired) (for OSSIM, and QGIS)
• QuantumGIS (desired) - depends on Qt.
• OSSIM (desired) - depends on Qt.
• R (desired)
• FDO (desired)
• MapGuide Open Source (desired) - depends on FDO
• Geoinformatica stack (contains GTK, Perl, GDAL, GDAL-Perl, GTK-Perl, etc) (committed, Ari)

More detailed information on specific packages is available on the OSGeo4W Packages wiki page.

Participants

(interested package maintainers please add your name below!)

• Jeff McKenna: MS4W Maintainer
• Frank Warmerdam: FWTools
• Mateusz Loskot: maintain GDAL related components
• Yewondwossen Assefa: MapServer core
• Ari Jolma: Geoinformatica stack

Upcoming Work Priorities

• look into packaging (download packages directly from server...)
• mailing list setup (done)
• put initial structure into OSGeo SVN
• look into sponsors from organizations

Timelime

• base structure intact by April 2008

Long-Term Plan

• select a Project Steering Committee
• enter incubation as an OSGeo project

Licensing

• are there any licensing issues with the proposed packages?

Technical Notes

• existing MS4W NSIS installer script
• existing PostGIS NSIS installer script
• existing FWTools NSIS installer script
• Paul Ramsey notes that for installation in corporate environments it can be very helpful to provide MSI files, and to support non-interactive distribution.
• Markus Neteler mentioned that 6.3.0 winGRASS is now in RC1 (download) and also included in QGIS 0.9.0

Installer Creation Software

• several projects use NSIS (Quantum GIS, PostGIS, FWTools, MS4W, ...)
• would make sense to use what we know (NSIS) and share
• The Cygwin Setup program could be modified for use as OSGeo4W installer (working prototype) with OSGeo4W Packaging details and existing OSGeo4W Packages.

Build Environment

• MSVC 7.1 currently used (by MapServer buildkit, FWTools)
• possibly time to upgrade buildkit to 2005 (since a free version available, "Express")
• what about MSYS support?
• have a Windows VM on telascience ??
• also should segment from massive buildkit
• include build library files (header files, similar to how FWTools does currently)
  • offer as developer components??

Custom Scripting in Installer

• BAT files for sure
• Perhaps we could depend on PHP can be used for post-install custom scripting if we consider this a base requirement.

Versions

• must pick our supported version of PHP, Python, etc. to use throughout installer buildkit

MS4W

As a followon to MS4W the following are expected/required:

• Apache
  • install into any directory
  • allow user to specify port to use
• MapServer
  • SDE, Oracle plugins
  • Mapscript: PHP, Java, Python, C#
  • AGG
• All existing MS4W packages and utilities:
  • Utilities:
    • avce00
    • dem tools
    • shapelib
    • shp2tile
    • shpdiff
  • Packages (user can optionally include these):
    • ArcIMS Emulator
    • Chameleon
    • dBox MapServer
    • FIST
    • GeoMOOSE
    • ka-Map
    • Mapbender
    • MapServer Itasca Demo Application
    • MapServer OGC Web Services Workshop
    • OpenLayers
    • PHP/Mapscript Sample Application
    • phpPgAdmin
    • p.mapper
• Miscellaneous
  • automatically upgrade/install packages directly from the maptools.org server

Note: Microsoft IIS web server requirement might be handled with a community wiki