Hi all, With the upcoming RC releases for GRASS 7 it's high time that we consider it's inclusion in Debian and it's derivatives via official packages.
The GRASS team maintains debian packaging on Launchpad [1] where they having packing for both a grass70 and grass71 source package. One of the questions for the Debian GIS team is to decide whether we want to follow upstream in this regards or choose to stick to a single grass source package. Since GRASS has only a few reverse dependencies, I'm inclined to stick to a single grass source package. I don't think upstream will maintain the GRASS 6.4 after the release the GRASS 7.0, this is an assumption though as I'm not aware of their release plans. Initially I thought about keeping GRASS 6.4 and 7.0 separate to help ease migration for both end users and ourselves with respect to the reverse dependencies. But I've become more skeptical about the value of keeping GRASS 6.4 after the release of 7.0. And I also suspect that the Release Team will not accept multiple GRASS versions in a stable release. Migrating from GRASS 6.4 to 7.0 and possibly even 7.1 during the stretch development cycles seems doable due to the limited number of reverse dependencies: libgdal-grass e00compr epigrass qgis-plugin-grass GDAL 1.11.0 improved support for GRASS 7, so that's unlikely to cause problems. e00compr is not actively developed upstream, so I suspect that may cause problems with GRASS 7. epigrass only suggests grass, and doesn't build depend on it. I've heard about the QGIS GRASS plugin not supporting GRASS 7 yet, but that's unlikely to remain the case after the release of 7.0. The OSGeo Live team already includes the grass70 packages, but the issue tracking it [2] doesn't have any information about breakage yet. The upcoming GRASS 7 release is a good opportunity to cleanup the grass package, address its lintian issues, and squash it's relatively many outstanding bugs. I suggest we keep GRASS 6.4 in unstable until we handled all issues with the move to 7.0, and start packaging 7.0 for experimental. I'd like to hear your thoughts about the future of the grass package, and the move from 6.4 to 7.0. Kind Regards, Bas [1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~grass/grass/grass70_release_debian/files [2] http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/1433 -- GPG Key ID: 4096R/E88D4AF1 Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146 50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
