sphgeom needs at a minimum to be installable with "eups distrib install" (i.e. be eupspkg-compatible). It should also be sconsUtils-compatible, which means that it should contain a .cfg file saying what it exports. Finally, it would be nice if it is eups-compatible (meaning that developers can do "setup -r" and build in the expected way for the LSST Stack, as opposed to making it more of an external package).

Note that if, contra the last comment, sphgeom is to be considered a fully non-LSST external package, then it should be packaged like other external packages (as a tar-and-patch package).

Given there is potential MariaDB's new GIS will come handy, we are putting this story on the back burner for a little while to see how things are progressing with MariaDB GIS.

The pull request is https://github.com/lsst/sphgeom/pull/2

Should be straightforward - changes consist of removing the previous build system, moving code around, and some minor adjustment of includes.

Looks fine to me!

Thanks, Serge. Is there a follow-up ticket to cut qserv over to this and cut loose the clone in the qserv source tree?

Yes: DM-2646 and DM-2178, which appear to be duplicates (see the issue links section).