[postgis-users] Roadmap for next major release of PostGIS

Chris Hermansen chris.hermansen at timberline.ca
Wed May 28 09:04:33 PDT 2008


Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> So as a result of this, the 1.3 series has now been officially
> branched within SVN, with the following development roadmap for trunk:
>
>
> - Rework the autoconf build system to use autoheader/PGXS
> The autoconf system was never being used to its full potential; a new
> build system will be much easier to maintain, and should open the door
> for easier compilation on other platforms, in particular MSVC.
Ideally, all of us users out there should want to see an approach that
makes builds "simple" for developers :-)

But in the interesting situation where we users find ourselves needing
to build some components from source (say, because GEOS in the Ubuntu
repos is still at 2.2):

Do you anticipate trying to make a PGXS-based build system for GEOS and
Proj as well?

Do you forsee this PGXS-based approach working well in conjunction with
headers and libraries delivered through package managers like apt or
yum?  Speaking selfishly, I'd rather not see you make it easier for
building on a windows platform at the expense of others...

I guess a more productive way to make this comment is how do the
developers see the user community doing builds?  Do you need us to tell
you when, why, how?
> *****
> As a consequence of this, support for PostgreSQL < 8.1 will be
> removed. Also, in line with the official PostgreSQL development
> policy, Win32 installers for releases before PostgreSQL 8.2 will NOT
> be produced
> *****
Speaking only for myself, of course, but I don't think it's a Bad Thing
to remove support for builds prior to (current - 1) or at most (current
- 2) PostgreSQL.
> - Make PROJ.4/GEOS compulsory dependencies for the build
> This will allow us to remove more #if...#endif statements related to
> producing special versions of PROJ.4/GEOS functions in the case where
> different combinations of libraries are present. This will make life
> much easier for developers.
It would be nice if Proj and GEOS dependencies also suggested to the
builder that the latest version should be used...
> - Rewrite the regression test harness
> The regression test harness is currently written as a shell script,
> which makes running regression tests under Win32 only possible under
> MingW. In order to support an MSVC build, it is intended to re-write
> the regression test script in Perl (which is required to build
> PostgreSQL under MSVC).
Too bad it wasn't possible to write the regression tests in Python. 
Why?  Well, I think having some documented examples of good Python /
PostGIS / PostgreSQL usage would be very helpful to the users thinking
about coming over from an ESRI / Python environment...
> In terms of support, we hope to be able to maintain the 1.3 branch
> until the end of the 1.3.x series. It may be that some patches/fixes
> are not backpatchable to the 1.3 series, however we will try our best
> to keep both the 1.3 branch and SVN trunk up to date with
> patches/issues on the PostGIS bug tracker.
I didn't see official mention of the launch point for all of the above,
but based on the preceding paragraph I'm assuming that all this Good
Stuff will happen in 1.4, or 2.0, or something like that...???
>
> [Note: I have also CC-d to postgis-devel, but please keep any
> resulting discussion on postgis-users]
>
>
> ATB,
>
> Mark.
>


-- 
Regards,

Chris Hermansen         mailto:chris.hermansen at timberline.ca
tel+1.604.714.2878 · fax+1.604.733.0631 · mob+1.778.232.0644
Timberline Natural Resource Group · http://www.timberline.ca
401 · 958 West 8th Avenue  · Vancouver BC · Canada · V5Z 1E5




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