[DebianGIS-dev] Bug#603470: libmapnik0.7: package linked against broken external AGG

[David Paleino]

Hello Sven,

On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:19:31 +0100, Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 02:15:00PM +0100, Sven Geggus wrote:
> > The current Version of Mapnik in Debian (squeeze and sid) has been
> > linked against the AGG library provided by the system.

Yes, this was intended by the previous maintainer, see #493786 .

> > Looks like this library (2.5.x) is more or less unmaintained. For
> > this reason mapnik provides a custom Version of the AGG library which
> > fixes the bugs which causes mapnik to hang.
> > 
> > The discussion about this topic can be found here:
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/mapnik-users@lists.berlios.de/msg02953.html
> > 
> > I know that the debian policy is to always use external libraries, but
> > this renders the provided package more or less unusable.
> > [..]
> 
> [..]
> 
> That said, the AGG case is quite unfortunate, because AGG 2.5
> is GPL2 and AGG 2.4 is MIT licensed. That implies that the 
> whole mapnik should be considered GPL-2 released and that
> should be noted. This is also something bad, because it
> violates the original upstream will IMHO. Note also that
> the embedded copy is a 2.3 or 2.4 version, and we used
> the same approach for mapserver to avoid those kind
> of problems. 

It's a 2.3, at least from what agg/copying says.

> Seriously someone should consider an AGG fork from 2.4
> which is something maybe mapserver folks already did.

Francesco, do you know if such a fork has been officially announced, with
proper releases and such?
It might make sense to provide a separate package (but this is surely
post-Squeeze) to link against. So that we don't need N copies of libagg spread
around the archive.

> My best guessing is moving to the embedded copy 
> if resulting issues are grave enough to compromise
> its use. 

I need to contact the security and release teams before.
I'll reply ASAP.

Kindly,
David

-- 
 . ''`.   Debian developer | http://wiki.debian.org/DavidPaleino
 : :'  : Linuxer #334216 --|-- http://www.hanskalabs.net/
 `. `'`  GPG: 1392B174 ----|---- http://deb.li/dapal
   `-   2BAB C625 4E66 E7B8 450A C3E1 E6AA 9017 1392 B174
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/attachments/20101115/1fa0a961/attachment.pgp>