Debian GIS is a project with the goal of making Debian the best distribution for Geographical Information System applications.

OSGeo live (live.osgeo.org) is a self-contained bootable dvd, usb thumb drive or virtual machine based on Lubuntu, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It also contains a set of uniform documentation (description and quickstarts) to guide people around the different projects.

Even though OSGeo live is based on the packages in Debian, both projects diverted and where OSGeo live managed to get a large (100+) community of contributors, progress in Debian GIS was stalling. Recently however, a new wind is blowing in Debian GIS (among others with the Debian pure blends initiative) and many changes from OSGeo live are being incorporated back into Debian.

Apart from presenting both projects I will highlight some problems people encounter when they would like to add their package to Debian GIS, and how Debian pure blends try to solve this.