Hamish, good points.

activityworkshop, it does look like your project is a good candidate for osgeo-live. My impression of the project so far, with minimal review, is that there is one developer (yourself?), 10 to 20 translators, and maybe 100 to 1000 users? How many downloads do you get?
Is this about right?

My assessment is that you have a very healthy project, which is in its early stages of growth. It is driven by one person, yourself, who is probably quite a good programmer, but would benefit from some marketing experience. You'd also benefit from having some more people looking through your code.

Your project is a prime candidate for OSGeo-Live, once you can provide the confidence that the project is stable and healthy. A bit of attention to your website will attract you more developers and users.

I'd be happy to mentor you through this early stage if you would like, and give advice on how to improve your marketing message, and attract developers.

My advice so far is:
* Update your website so that it has all the key links that people look for in obvious places: "Downloads", "Contact Us", "About", "Documentation"

* Put your code into svn or similar, and make it easy to find. (I might be looking in the wrong place).

* Set up an issue tracker

* Start building up your projects processes (a medium term goal). Eg: Document your release process, ...

I expect that you should be able to put all these things in place before the next release of OSGeo-Live ~ Feb/March next year. I'd then be more confident recommending your project as a project up to OSGeo Live's quality.


On 10/10/10 07:02, Hamish wrote:
activityworkshop:
   I wonder if you would perhaps be interested in including the "Prune"
application in some future release?
looks good to me, I support it.
do you fall under OSM's umbrella, or are you an independent project?

Cameron:
I'm wary of the OSGeo-Live disk promoting every possible
application, as it will just confuse new users.
We do have similar applications packaged for other domains,
but it is useful if we can recommend the best of breed.
I'm not so worried about that- as long as we have a (better) menu hierarchy
in place. I mean we already have $x apps which act as a map server or
read/write geotiff, shapefile, gpx format. And that's a good thing!

more importantly, I don't want to and don't think we should be trying to
make that decision for the user if the competing projects are more or less
in the same league. Set a standard, present the options, and let the user
decide what fits their needs.

e.g. should we pick and only ship 1 map server? hell no.
that is not to say that we shouldn't have our standards though.

activityworkshop:
It's written in Java, runs on Win/Mac/Linux, is GPL'd
and already included in Debian (from Squeeze onwards) and
Ubuntu (from Meerkat onwards).  So I'm guessing that it
wouldn't be too difficult to include on the DVD,
You already sort of answered this but does it require sun's java, or is
if happy with openjdk? (is that experience imperfect?) I am a bit concerned
that eventually we will have to move to openjdk if the legal winds change
any more than they already have, and it is best to be ready.

Are packages for lucid available from an ubuntu launchpad ppa? (if not
you can probably submit them to UbuntuGIS's one) or as a simple .deb
download?

Cameron:
(We are reaching capacity on the DVD disk)
not a bad question to ask, but fyi I've just cleared out 600mb.

activityworkshop:
It also plays nicely with gpsbabel, gnuplot and exiftool, but doesn't
require them.
gpsbabel and gnuplot are already installed, exiftool is not AFAIK but
would be simple to add.

activityworkshop:
Ok, so those requirements sound perhaps a little too demanding for Prune
at the moment.
those are not hard requirements, but they certainly help. Most OSM tools
would not meet them right now, although most OSGeo tools do. The challenge
Cameron is describing (if I may paraphrase) is to get as many great apps on
the livedvd as possible without diluting to the quality. And as far as
first impressions go it only takes one ill placed bug in one app to smear
the impression of everything else. So it pays to be a bit cautious.


anyway perhaps most importantly I am happy for the upstream involvement and
interest. A lot flows from that.


regards,
Hamish




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Cameron Shorter
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Think Globally, Fix Locally
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