efforts that have already demonstrated
community interest amoung users and contributors. I think
OSGeo4W has done both.
+1
I must admit I'm not absolutely certain what the best way is
to move OSGeo4W forward. Given the right person interested
in working on the project full time (or a substantial part time)
at a "scrappy" price, I'd push for funding but I'm not sure that
such a person exists.
For myself, the limiter on participation is mostly available time. My
work priorities make osgeo4w a very distant poor cousin, and at home
family life consumes most everything. Funding would not change this.
(Unless of course Osgeo4w /was /my job! A delightful prospect which I
would embrace fully and gladly, however there even if such a thing were
available there are many others much more qualified than I. So for the
foreseeable future it's status quo for me.)
My original point to the board was that I hesitate to fire money at
OSGeo4W as long as we are having trouble building a vision of how to
proceed with it.
+1
Without a clear idea of what we might be done with an influx of
resources the most likely result would be a bigger and more exaggerated
version of what we have now.
Certainly my view of Debian-like packaging has not got universal
acclaim, nor has the current approach of haphazard hand building of
packages always worked out well.
Some of the packaging woes could be solved, or at least eased, if the
many and growing python addons leveraged the standard installers, as
decribed in http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/wiki/ExternalPythonPackages. I
believe that issues like dll-hell and incompatible compiler
configurations which have been causing trouble with QGIS and friends in
the last couple of years are side-stepped with python. (I'm not certain
of this though, the idea needs more testing.)
For the non-python packages I'm very much in favour of a debian-like
package system (and wish there was one for all of Windows).
we could probably make it more reliable if we don't let the users to
create their packages by hand. ... a build environment (a dedicated
server) to provide the builds and the users should just author their
build scripts which would check out the sources and compile it regularly
I think this would go a long way to strengthening o4w, especially if the
build server/environment also built and tested the install packages.
Often it takes me twice as much time and headscratching to verify the
packaging than it does to construct it in the first place.
best,
matt wilkie
--------------------------------------------
Geomatics Analyst
Information Management and Technology
Yukon Department of Environment
10 Burns Road * Whitehorse, Yukon * Y1A 4Y9
867-667-8133 Tel * 867-393-7003 Fax
http://environmentyukon.gov.yk.ca/geomatics/
--------------------------------------------
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