[mapserver-users] Meeting

[Mike Neuman]

> MapServer is not just a success, it is a raving success.

  I'm new to the Mapserver community. I would agree with this statement from
a *technical* point of view, but strongly disagree from an approchability
point of view. There are virtually NO examples of how to create maps, do
things in mapscript, etc. It took at least 20 hours of me fighting with
Mapscript and a .map file before I could get a relatively simple map to
display. Then another 8 hours to get the projection right. If I didn't hate
my GIS program so much, I probably would have given it up after the first
few hours.

  The documentation has several major errors (queryByPoint still appears on
the web site, when queryUsingPoint is correct), PHP Mapscript crashes my
webserver when executing simple (and correct, according to the docs) code,
and Perl Mapscript coredumps whenever you create a new class in an existing
layer or a new layer in an existing map. To get the projection stuff to work
as you might expect, I had to upgrade to 3.5. My existing Mapscript code
stopped working entirely (with only minor changes made to fix the semantic
changes of msSaveImage) by spitting out a blank map, so I had to downgrade
to 3.3. Finally, in attempt to debug several things on my own, I downloaded
and installed SWIG. Unfortunately, the .i files are no longer compatible
with the current version of SWIG. I could not build mapscript from the CVS
checkout, and I could not overwrite any of the _wrap files on the nightly
builds.

  All of these problems have workarounds, but without examples, it's an
*extremely* painful process to figure them out.

  So, I implore the Mapserver community: Contribute every Mapscript and .map
sample file you can find and *put it in the distribution*. Or at least make
another distribution (and ms_demo doesn't cut it) that has dozens of
examples. The Mapscript examples IN the mapscript distro are worthless--they
don't even draw a map!

  Thanks for listening. :-) I do love Mapserver. It's something I've wanted
for a long time. I can't imagine how fast Mapserver's use would spread if it
were approachable. That's all I ask.

-Mike