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:
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Get current GDAL, PROJ, GEOS, QGIS, Fiona, PDAL, … maintainers and current/potential contributors interested in joining the team
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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.maintainersto 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.
Please, think about joining. Ivan.