Need basemap package for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

[Tybion]

In Ubuntu 22.04 LTS the basemap package is available as a Ubuntu package ..
sudo apt install python3-mpltoolkits.basemap

Can you please assist the Ubuntu team to make this available in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

[DWesl]

I suspect this would be a question for the Ubuntu maintainers, and that they have a document somewhere with directions on how you could become the person to provide the python3-mpltoolkits.basemap package for Ubuntu 24.04. There is an excellent chance the 22 LTS package has a source package you can use as a starting point. As I don't have an Ubuntu machine, I will need slightly more than "apt-get install python3-mpltoolkits.basemap doesn't work" to be able to help.

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide looks like a promising source of information on how to compile packages on Ubuntu, and the Developer Advisory Team suggests places to ask for help; a different page on that Wiki reinforces those suggestions. There's another guide on GitHub. The 20 LTS source package and the 22 LTS source package are probably also useful; there's lists of packages needed to build basemap and downloads that likely have the commands to compile so everything plays nice with Ubuntu and winds up in an installable package.

If you run into problems building basemap, whether while using the Ubuntu packaging tools (once they've gotten to the part where they're building basemap: I can't really help with the bits before that) or with pip install --user basemap, you can report those issues back here.

Of course, you could also install basemap using one of the "Scientific Python distributions" such as Anaconda (I'm not sure if the Enthought Python Distribution or Python(x,y) are still updated, nor whether they had basemap when they were).

[Tybion]

In the Ubuntu 22.04 basemap package it states ..

Warning: this package is being deprecated in favour of cartopy.

I have confirmed that I can run the following on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ..
sudo apt install python3-cartopy

[molinav]

@Tybion The deprecation notice is not a statement from the Debian package, but it was directly inherited from the basemap README file at the time in which basemap was marked for future deprecation and abandonment. This is not the case anymore since basemap 1.3.2 (when the deprecation was removed and some maintenance has kept ongoing since then), but the Debian package remains based on the outdated 1.2.2 (from August 2020). Maybe it would be a good moment for the Debian maintainers to revisit the recipe and see if they can migrate it to basemap 1.4.1 (from February 2024). Unfortunately, I do not know any of them.

This main focus of this repo is the development of the basemap upstream project, issues like the Debian/Ubuntu packaging are out of scope and are better addressed to who can actually fix them (I see it similar to the issues with basemap packaging in conda distributions, for which https://github.com/conda-forge/basemap-feedstock is the right place to ask). In this repo, the only packaging target is the generation and upload of wheels to PyPI so that python -m pip install basemap works.