Thanks Hamish,
You have done some wonderful work getting projects onto OSGeo-Live, but
I'm aware that you have less time than you've had before, and as such
the currency of the projects on OSGeo-Live have suffered.
If you know of anyone else in each of the project communities worth
reaching out to and asking if they can help, can you please share their
details so one of us can contact them. (Alternatively you might have a
personal connection with them and might want to reach out yourself).
Feel free to share publicly or privately.
Cheers, Cameron
On 25/4/17 9:38 am, Hamish B wrote:
Hi all,
to document some offline discussions here are some notes on some
packages which I've maintained in the past. (ah those halcyon days
when I had free moments to work on things properly...)
GMT: In theory this should just be an apt-get install and minor tweak
to the $PATH in /etc/bash.bashrc or /etc/profile.d/. The harder part
is providing a decent quickstart for a complicated-to-use package.
Package remains popular in the world of geophysics, open any AGU/EGU*
publication, Science magazine etc and you'll see lots of GMT-produced
maps.
[*] Hi to anyone there
MB Systems: n.b. depends/built on GMT
- commit metrics may show few contributers but they are full time
funded programmers who act as the gatekeepers for community patches.
The mailing lists and userbase is quite active.
As a meta thing I'd suggest to add some sort of mailing list/forum
activity to the metrics as an additional indicator of project health,
if possible. Quickstart doc could be parsed for the link?
- Sending some needed patches to the current DebianGIS package
maintainers is on my todo list. Alas build systems do not stand still.
OpenCPN: fun, easy to use, vibrant community, arguably better than any
commercial offerings in the space, lots of plugins, ... but no
marketing budget beyond word of mouth between boaties. As long as the
packages are in good shape I'd vote to keep it going.
ZyGrib: not nearly as refined as OpenCPN but fills its niche quite
well and puts weather forecasting in the hands of the people in a way
that (as far as I'm aware) no other software does. Used together with
a OpenCPN's GRIB overlay plugin there's a gorgeous gee-whiz demo
available. I'll have to prepare a screenshot to show that off.
Sahana/Ushahidi: I really like having some blatant FOSS-for-good
software on the disc, but the communities really need to step up here
to maintain them. The "geo" tie may not be as "hard-geo" as geo-format
processing tools, but at least the main work-canvas is a map and it
passes any geo-as-global (e.g. national geographic/bbc world) test.
OSM: if metrics show Merkaartor/osmosis are withering on the vine, so
be it. Note some of the tools are part of the OSM data city-extract
production tool-chain so not much extra work to keep them around. I
assume some small background tools can be left on the disc even if a
quickstart/summary doesn't make the cut?
R: is it "geo" enough to justify inclusion/megabytes used? (same
question for Octave [does the m_map toolbox for Matlab work with
Octave? FOSS-enough license?])
Viking: I haven't been paying attention to how active it is. If new
versions are coming in from ubuntu and the install is little more than
apt-get install I'd say keep it, otherwise if it is stalled for years
and little interest I'd say dump it.
As a general thing, if projects want to stay they can send someone to
help.
I'd suggest to leave GMT/MB Sys/OpenCPN/ZyGrib in my hands, and if
updates are not in place by 15 May put non-working things onto the
hibernation track as needed.
best regards from deep in the south pacific,
Hamish
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Cameron Shorter
M +61 419 142 254
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