[postgis-devel] PostGIS Development Roadmap

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Hi Magnus!

Magnus Hagander wrote:

> As the main win32 guy for the main project, +42 for that one :-) It
> also helps a lot with debugging at the end users installation.

Indeed. While there has been some interest in PostGIS development, I do 
get the feeling that requiring a MingW setup is keeping some people away 
from getting involved with the project :(

> Note that pgxs doesn't work with the MSVC build of the backend, because
> it relies on GNU Make and shellscrpits, IIRC.

Yes, I was aware of that. It was more a case of "while we are re-jigging 
the build system for MSVC, let's drop our own hacked version of pre-PGXS 
build scripts" at the same time ;)

> Have you considered systems like cmake?

Well it's something I have thought about. I don't know how well it would 
hook into PGXS though since as you mention PGXS requires GNU make to 
work. Now if the PostgreSQL project were to move over to CMake and 
re-work PGXS to suit, that would be *very* interesting. Unfortunately I 
think Peter E will fight hard against any changes along those lines :(

> Actually, the main PostgreSQL scripts have a specific regression test
> driver written in C, that can run any kind of regression tests scripts.
> It's also used by ecpg, for example. Perhaps you can use that one?

Yes, I did see those a while back. Unfortunately the regression tests 
currently do different things based upon which versions of GEOS/PROJ are 
installed, so if we did try and use this, there would still need to be a 
pre-processing step involved. Also, the PostGIS tests fire up the 
external shapefile loader and perform imports/exports of geometry data 
from the server, and I don't know enough (yet) to understand how much 
work would be required for the existing test harness to support this.

> These are some quick comments from a PostGIS development outsider :-)
> While I don't (currently) do any development on PostGIS, we do have a
> number of customers that are running it, thus my interest.

:) of course! Thanks for the comments...


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland
Sirius Corporation - The Open Source Experts
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
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