[FGS] Re: GIS suite

[Tyler Mitchell]

> A couple of years ago, I sent Tyler an ms cdrom that used this approach, 

> and AFAIR, there was no real problem with
> deployment at least...

That's right - no real problem at all.  At the time you also mentioned 
that cross platform demo CD of similar nature wouldn't be that hard.  Did 
you ever go there?

> I agree that distro's should be fat;
> I feel apps should be statically linked (either works or it doesnt)

Can you guys describe the overhead involved with compiling as static 
instead?  Is it an easy task?

> Is anyone running the pythonmapscript stuff? If so, webserver should run 

> it...

Indeed.  Our aim with the foss gis suite is to support python as much as 
possible, so python mapscript should be a target.

> Where is foss heading wrt desktop apps?

This is where I would really like see this project go in the end.  There 
are a lot of options but none, in my opinion, have all that it takes. 
I'd like see as many of the tools available to as wide an audience as 
possible - thereby giving some choice and broadening the user community 
around them.  Since Frank's on board I think OpenEV would be the ideal 
first target.  Then perhaps the other Python-based app Thuban would be a 
good choice.  QGIS is a bit deeper dependency-wise (from my experience 
with QT).  Then there's GRASS - it's been a while since I've used it so 
I'm not sure how it's packaged.  JUMP is java-based.

Am I forgetting others?

I'd love to get Geoserver with geoclient running too, but that means we'll 
need java tomcat server right?

Tyler