I am still quite new to Nix, but have a big interest in evolution of Nix
geospatial software stack. I currently don’t maintain any Nix package, but
definitely want to contribute and make Nix to become de-facto industry standard
for accessing high quality geospatial software.
That’s why I am thinking about creating Nix geospatial team which could, for the
start, take responsibility for maintenance of QGIS and all it’s build
dependencies like GDAL, PROJ, GEOS, Spatialite, … .
Advantage of having the team can be possibility to have some regular catch-ups and
easier and faster access to PR reviews.
Big thanks goes to people who already did lot of work in geospatial packages:
To explore the playground I started NUR repo which can be potentially used for
latest versions of maintained packages and can serve as some kind of incubator.
It would be awesome if this team could produce contributor documentation as they stumble into inevitable problems. @lucperkins (documentation team) could you assist with that?
Hi all,
this is another attempt to get Geospatial team alive and working.
I spent few months in exploring Nix geospatial packages, did few contributions and saw huge amount of work done by many individuals. And I still see very big value in much closer and more systematic collaboration as a team.
The proposals is following:
Get current GDAL, PROJ, GEOS, QGIS, Fiona, PDAL, … maintainers and current/potential contributors interested in joining the team
Have a regular virtual meetings and work on following:
first, decide on the list of packages we want to collaboratively maintain as a team and formalize it by updating meta.maintainers to point to the team rather to the individuals
fine tune and document our specific policies and requirements for key things like:
packaging style: code formatting, usage of package sources (use Github or PyPi for Python packages ?), style of package testing, good and consistent support for package overrides
stable branch backporting policy: which patch releases are 99% safe to backport, which are not
PR reviews: make sure all team members are notified when there is a change in one of our packages and we might require review by a team member done according our policies
identify current biggest problems and try to find some solutions - for example how to get QGIS working Mac ?!
create some road map for next stable release: packages versions we want to see in next stable Nixpkgs branch, add missing packages (like proj-data), current packages improvements (adding support for some missing geospatial formats), …
All of that will of course remain as pure voluntary work, the same as it is done now, but we might achieve much better results when working together.
I wanted to say: this is really awesome you are doing all this work. Please let me know if I can help for PR review, etc. as I see that the geospatial team is still trying to lift off.
Thank you for commenting your status on the release issue.
Thanks @SergeK , the team is currently only in the process of creation. Currently contains only two people. You are welcome to join if you are in to Nix geospatial packages maintenance. No matrix yet.
Hey, I have mostly dealt with geospatial Python packages but would be interested in joining! I sent a request on GitHub to join the team, please let me know if you want additional details. I believe I can readily help with maintaining geospatial Python packages but other languages will depend widely. I believe debugging other languages will be at least a great learning experience for me :D.
