[DebianGIS-dev] [DebianGIS] Bug#588812: Debian GIS metapackages available [Was: debian-gis_0.0.1_i386.changes ACCEPTED]

[Hamish]

Andreas:
> So what do you think about my suggestions to make Debian GIS more
> popular than it currently is?

come on now, we are all intelligent people worthy of mutual respect. please
let's have a reasonable discussions without reverting to lame rhetorical
devices and trolling.

So what are the suggestion(s) we are talking about??  I take it you just
mean to rename pkg-grass-general at lists.alioth.d.o to debiangis at lists.d.o
and pkg-grass-devel at lists.alioth.d.o to debiangis-commit at lists.d.o?

anything else?


> I think it is a shame that Debian GIS is quite unknown to potentially
> interested persons and please trust me:  I asked a lot of people when I
> did talks about Blends and mentioned Debian GIS as a
> potential Blend - there was nobody aware of this project whereever I
> asked.  And there where people around which are working with GIS
> software.

any interested person looking at the apt-cache info of any of our packages
will clearly see who the maintainer is.. I would not think that renaming
the mailing lists would harm our exposure, but I think it's somewhat
optimistic to think that that it will bring us too many new committers.

i.e. people heavily using the packages are the best dev pool, and they
already know about us since looking at a package status or filing a bug.


> I also continue to think that we should try to involve OSM into
> the Debian GIS project.

the door is always open to anyone who wants to show up.. all are welcome.

In my experience working with both sides, there exists a slightly
different community between the DebianGIS/OSGeo crowd and the OSM crowd.
Not that it is good or bad, and many of us know people from both so it
is easy to cc an email when needed, but just my 2c observation.


> This all makes IMHO a lot of sense to discuss on a mailing list and

of course, ... (isn't that what we're doing?)

> especially if we are in the process of a release mentioning such a
> mailing list in the release notes would give the project a lot of
> attention and probably new supporters.

anywhere the -k12/-edu, -med, etc. projects are mentioned it makes sense
to mention DebianGIS too, with the wiki page as the primary point of
contact. I'm not sure how that is not already covered and how any mailing
list changes would alter that..?



For my part, I do not object to renaming the mailing list to something
more relevant, but with 3 conditions:


*** the mailing list history is preserved

Alexander Wirt wrote:
> > Its no problem to import old mails if the come in a common format like
> > mbox. 

(I assume the Alioth admins are willing and able to provide the mbox file?)



*** Right now this list sends me _zero_ spam. I would be rather unhappy
if that were no longer the case and I was forced to set up a local
spamassassin instance to deal with it, and have to dig through spam when
searching through the archives.



*** the pkg-grass-devel list be renamed debiangis-commit (i.e. what it is)
to stop the confusion there of humans posting to that list.



thanks,
Hamish