3.3.003 released etc.

[Stephen Lime]

Greetings and a happy new year to all... The 1st maintenance release of 2000 is out today- 3.3.003.
It has a few bug fixes related to point rendering and single result queries. As usual there are a couple
of additions:

  - shapelib is gone from the distribution. there were enough changes from shapelib 1.1.5 that i thought
    it best to absorb the code into the main source tree and remove any confusion related to shapelib
    versions. mapserver could not exist without shapelib source and i'll continue to watch new shapelib
    development and apply changes to the code embeded in mapserver. i encourage users to use
    the most recent shapelib and utilities for developing tools for managing shapefiles.

  - i've changed spatial indexing support as of 3.3.003. instead of the grid based approach used in 
    pervious versions i adapted a quadtree method written for the latest versions of shapelib. the jury
    is still out on wether the quadtree is faster than the grid, should be in theory. so, to create a spatial
    index for a layer use the helper program called "shptree". syntax is "shptree [shpfile] {depth}". If tree
    depth is omitted then a depth is calculated so each tree node (quadtree cell) contains 8 shapes. do
    not use the default with point files, a value between 6 and 10 seems to work ok. your millage may
    vary and you'll need to do some experimenting.

On the documentation front. The HTML versions of docs are being incorporated into a single PDF 
document. Should be ready by the end of month.

Just an informal show of hands. Who is using what versions?

Thanks - Steve

Stephen Lime
Internet Applications Analyst

Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-297-2937