The Debian GIS Debian Pure Blend is organized by tasks, that group packages around broad themes such as web services and workstation. The tasks list programs that are already packaged in Debian as well as packages in preparation.
The tasks files are not hosted in the Debian GIS repositories, but in the Debian Blends repository. Interested members of the Debian GIS project on Salsa can request commit access to the Blends repository. You can easily check out its sources with the command:
debcheckout -a debian-gis
The syntax of the tasks files is very similar to Debian control files, and described on the Debian Blends website.
The Debian GIS Blend metapackages can be installed on a normal Debian
installation. How this can be achieved depends on which version of
Debian you are running. On Debian wheezy, there is the
gis-tasks package which adds the Debian GIS package
groups to tasksel. After installing the
gis-tasks package you can run
tasksel and select the package groups to install.
Run as root:
apt-get install gis-tasks tasksel
On Debian jessie (or later), you can do the same. Or, you can also install one of the metapackages directly. Again, as root:
apt-get install <metapackage>
These are the metapackages/tasks can that be installed using this method, and the links to information about the included packages:
gis-data - Debian GIS data
gis-gps - GPS related programs
gis-osm - OpenStreetMap related programs
gis-remotesensing - Remote sensing and earth observation
gis-statistics - Statistics with geographic data
gis-workstation - Geographic Information Systems (GIS) workstation
gis-devel - GIS development packages
On a normal computer desktop, you will most likely want to install at least the workstation task which contains most commonly used GIS applications.