Hi Debian fellows Long time has passed since the DebianGis manifesto [1] appeared on this list.
During last DebConf 2007 in Edinburgh [2] we defined a few medium time goals for our very specialized project. One of those goals is reporting to the general audience of developers what we call our "Status of the Map" - with an expression stolen to the widely known OpenStreetMap Project without any shame :) - in order to show how sexy and attractive a GIS-related Debian sub-project can be, say what we have done so far and what our next goals are. So here we go, let me start the first official report from the DebianGis Team... Who we are ---------- DebianGis is a seasoned sub-project launched at the end of 2004 thanks to the efforts of a tiny group of Debian developers and users. The main goal of DebianGis has been since then making Debian the best GNU/Linux distribution oriented to serious Geographical Information Systems (GIS) users and applications [3]. After almost three years of development we can say to be currently the reference distribution on that regards, with also some upstream developers who follow our main mailing list and give feedback. Almost exactly one year ago we presented DebianGis at FOSS4GIS [4], the leading FOSS conference of the GIS sector. Status of the Map ----------------- Our main efforts have been concentrated on packaging the mainstream GIS applications, such as Grass, Qgis, GDAL/OGR, Mapserver and PostGis for both desktop and server applications. We also extended maintenance to main libraries and tools previously under management of one single developer, like HDF4/5, Proj4 and GMT. A complete list of packages under team responsibility/monitoring is available on our Package Status Thermometer [5], along with a still long list of packages which we would like to see added to the Debian archive. Our main packages are almost continuously up-to-date in sid/testing and globally in very good shape on the subversion archive, so that many users are happy of using Debian as their main distribution also for leading edge development workstations. Recently, we moved our old information wiki on the official Debian wiki and dropped our local archive in favour of maintenance of DebianGIS packages on Backports.org [6] for supporting stable backports on more architectures and minimizing administration efforts. Next goals ---------- * Some specific packages such as Ossim and gvSIG. * Provide the tools needed for a OpenStreetmap [7] workstation * Java-related Gis applications and libraries for desktop and servers, such as uDig and Geotools. * Perl Geo:: modules [8] packaging. * Python and Ruby modules/binding packaging. * Grass add-ons. * Maintainance of a live-cd (we already have tasksel stuff on svn) [9]. * World domination. A more specific and long todo list is available on the wiki, people interested could use that to start working on some nice task. What we need ------------ Our goals are ambitious and extended, we need more interested and motivated people, possibly with some GIS experience in order to have positive feedback with our upstreams and being able of reproduce and fixing complicated bugs. Many GIS-related program are complex and are charming challenges for maintainers. We don't like trivial packages :) References: ~~~~~~~~~~~ [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/10/msg00007.html [2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis/EdiMeetingMinutes [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gis [4] http://www.foss4g2006.org/ [5] http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/debiangis-status.html [6] http://www.backports.org/ [7] http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [8] http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Geo%3A%3A&mode=module [9] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis/LiveImages -- Francesco P. Lovergine (in behalf of the DebianGis Team)
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