[mapserver-users] What is the best way to test development versions on Windows?

[TC Haddad]

I agree with Donald that MS4W is an excellent intro to Mapserver for many
people - I have used it to teach Mapserver to others and it works very well
for that purpose. It is super portable, easy to use offline - many, many
great attributes. As Jukka mentions, OSGeo4W just is not the same in many
aspects.

I've wondered for a long time over the last year how MS4W could be better
supported by the community members - one idea was a crowdsource-type
funding effort that could bring it current and possibly support more
frequent releases. That might begin to address the financial aspect of
support.

But I am also curious if there are some technical barriers that have been
slowing the release process down? There have been some threads on the
Mapserver Dev list that made me wonder if supporting Windows is becoming
more difficult due to some of the new aspects of Mapserver itself. I'm not
knowledgeable enough to have details, and I don't follow closely enough to
understand the full range of barriers.

Obviously there are a lot of potential users on Windows, and that is good
for Mapserver overall, so hopefully any technical barriers are solvable if
funding is available. But it is certainly also a problem that the pathways
for easy funding are not obvious to those with funds to contribute. As a
whole, it is hard to tell from a distance how to begin to try to help.

Tanya




On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 7:16 AM, Donald Kerr <donald.kerr at dkerr.co.uk>wrote:

> It would be good if Jeff McKenna could keep MS4W up to date but I realise
> that it's a lot of work and Jeff deserves financial compensation for doing
> so. It does seem to have lagged behind for some time now. For me, it's
> important in that it's a Windows version that some, including me, used as
> their introduction to MapServer. I feel that, with it lagging behind too
> much, it may push people in another direction which would be a shame for
> the
> MapServer project as a whole.
>
> Regards,
>
> Donald
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
> [mailto:mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Rahkonen
> Jukka
> (Tike)
> Sent: 13 February 2014 15:05
> To: Mapserver-Users (mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org)
> Subject: [mapserver-users] What is the best way to test development
> versions
> on Windows?
>
> Hi,
>
> I would like to test the new dynamic heatmaps
> http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-108.html but I am on Windows
> and
> Mapserver project is not extremely Windows friendly nowadays. Ideal for
> users like me would be to have for example weekly builds which could be
> installed like MS4W - unzip and run. But we don't have such builds and MS4W
> lags so much behind that curious users need to use something else.
>
> What I have done sometimes is to make a basic install with MS4W and then
> download fresh development binaries from gisinternals. By copying
> mapserv.exe and GDAL dll files into ms4w\apache\cgi-bin it is usually
> possible to make the new Mapserver dev version to run. However, the result
> is often unstable and some strange things happen.  Probably I have then
> something incompatible in GDAL directories of MS4W and I should copy some
> more files. Is it even theoretically possible to update MS4W reliably in
> this way?
>
> Another alternative is obviously to use OSGeo4W installer. However, I feel
> it is a somewhat odd creature which installs this and that even I would
> only
> like to test Mapserver. I seem to have about 1 GB on disk while MS4W is
> perhaps 200 MB.  It is also impossible to know what all OSGeo4W installer
> is
> updating when is installs a new nightly build of Mapserver so I think it is
> necessary to make a backup copy of the whole OSGeo4W directory if there
> happens to be a need to go back to yesterday's version.
>
> What other Windows users and developers consider as a best way to stay
> close
> to the cutting edge? Other than to start using Linux, I mean.
>
> -Jukka Rahkonen-
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