Distribution Special Interest Groups

This page proposes to create and promote a group of interest for distribution related issues.

Some aspects of distribution development and maintainance, as well as quality assurance practices are often quite obscure for many application developers, but essential to ensure an easy approach to free GIS for naive or also advanced users.

The key goals of this project are:

• Facilitate the integration of quality, stable, GeoFOSS packages into Software Distributions.
• Develop "Live CDs" for new users to trial GeoFOSS.
• Develop baseline GeoFOSS to be used as a basis for workshops, tutorials and presentations.

To achieve these goals, we will:

• Define and simplify the process for incorporating GeoFOSS packages into software distribution.
• Open channels of communication between packagers and application developers.
• Providing tools to facilitate GeoFOSS packaging.

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

OSGeo4W

OSGeo4W is a windows based stack of GeoFOSS which is based upon cygwin.

Goal: Ease of installation of the whole GeoFOSS stack in windows.

Status: Aug '08: Actively maintained by community, Works well

• Pros:
  • Has already packaged many of the key GeoFOSS applications.
  • Likely to release first major release at FOSS4G 2008, 29 Sep 2008.
  • Has strong developer community.

• Con
  • Needs installation
  • Needs internet connection for installation

PortableGIS

PortableGIS is a collection of GeoFOSS applications that run from a USB stick.

Goal: Have the most important applications always with you.

Status: Actively maintained by one person, (Jo Cook)

• Pro
  • No installation required, just run the applications

• Con
  • Doesn't work right from CD at the moment
  • Applications need clean-up (Eg. Java is bundled more than once)
  • Only one maintainer
  • Project development infrastructure not set up yet.
  • Would benefit by alignment with similar projects.
  • PortableGIS currently needs to be run from a writable medium (like and USB stick), it won't work on a read-only medium like a CD.

Linux

• 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.