[postgis-devel] Dev news

[strk at refractions.net]

Good morning all.
I send an overview of postgis development status and
short-term plans (sorry for the long post). 

For those of you still unaware of that the HEAD branch of
postgis is being completely modified as of source layout
and implementation.

Library source code has been removed from the root and
now reside under the 'lwgeom' directory. An 'hwgeom'
directory also exist but is going to be flushed.

Configuration directives are now in the Makefile.config
file, which is sourced by all subdirs Makefile that needs
configuration.

Root Makefile and subdirs Makefiles (lwgeom, loader) both
work in executing following rules:
	make
	make install
	make uninstall
	make clean

This layout is intended to reduce confusion of CVS testers
about whether they are working with hwgeom or lwgeom.

People interested in stiking with HWGEOM (old) geometry
representation for compatibility reasons (which needs to
be considered before LWGEOM release) can do so issuing
the following cvs command:

	cvs update -r pgis_0_9_0

The 'pgis_0_9_0' is a branch tag, which means every modification
made in the old branch will be spreaded in the next 'cvs update',
while changes in the HEAD branch will not.

LWGEOM already contains all functions port except 
	asbinary(geom, XDR|NDR) -- asbinary(geom) is available
	line_interpolate_point(geom, num) -- contributed
	geometry_size(geom, internal) -- obsoleted
	optimistic_overlap(geom, geom, double) - undocumented (replaced by &&?)

GiST index work, is faster, is smaller (box2d used as key instead of box).

Selectivity estimation works.

Loader should work (but untested) as LWGEOM text parser works with
both WKT and WKB.
Dumper still doesn't work (need to find an acceptable way to add support).

With the loader/dumper issue I think we should cleanup the api so that
these client applications can use library funx for wkb parsing, output.

In order to do so API function would probably need a parametric allocation
function instead of relying (as currently do) on availability of
palloc/repalloc/pfree.

--strk;