[Xastir] map problem on MEPIS

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 08:36:41PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <gdw at kc4pl.com> flavor, containing:
> OK, just did a few checks and see that the automake1.9 is not 
> specifically required anymore. The basic automake should be fine.  To be 
> truthful it was left over from a previous instruction set that I had, an 
> earlier version of Mepis seemed to want to install a less that the 
> latest version of Automake and it was know to cause problems.  So I had 
> it down to use v1.9.  The get-maptools.sh script will take care of the 
> Geotiff capability.  However when I just tried to run it for my new test 
> install the GDAL section errored out.  So the script itself seems to 
> have a problem for that one program.

I think the issue is that nobody is maintaining get-maptools anymore, and 
the versions listed in it for some programs are out of date. 

I don't recommend using get-maptools.  Dan Brown did a good job writing it
back in 2006, and it helped a lot of people.  It was a boon back when few 
systems had proj, geotiff, pcre, and shapelib, but now most systems do, and 
the packages can  (and should, in most cases) be installed from repositories 
instead of from source.  And GDAL support is mostly a waste of time in Xastir 
--- I wouldn't recommend that any user install it unless they actually need 
it for something else (like I do).  It is a great library, but Xastir's use of 
it is pretty much not worth the trouble.

Building libgeotiff is almost a no-brainer:

  wget http://dl.maptools.org/dl/geotiff/libgeotiff/libgeotiff-1.2.3.tar.gz
  tar xzf libgeotiff-1.2.3.tar.gz
  cd libgeotiff-1.2.3
  ./configure --with-ld-shared="gcc -shared"
  make
  sudo make install

That's all that get-maptools does.

The "with-ld-shared" thing is necessary for all 1.2.x versions of libgeotiff, 
because those versions incorrectly used "ld -shared" which broke with modern
versions of gcc.

You can just build libgeotiff with those 6 commands, then just reconfigure and 
rebuild Xastir.  Adding geotiff support once you've got all the other stuff 
working takes only a few minutes.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
  In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. 
                                  -- Ineffective daily affirmation