[geomoose-psc] GeoMoose 2.x retirement

[Jim Klassen]

I think it is time to officially retire support for the GeoMoose 2.x series.  To that end, I would like to notify our users (ahead of time) by making an announcement on geomoose-users, and adding appropriate news items/noting the status on appropriate places on the GeoMoose website.

What say ye?


Draft announcement:

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GeoMoose 2.x is getting long in the tooth and plans to retire in April 2019.

Summary:

Due to GeoMoose 2.x requiring now very old versions of it dependences it
is becoming increasingly difficult to support.  As such, the GeoMoose
team is announcing retirement for the GeoMoose 2.x series as April 2019.

This doesn't mean your older GeoMoose installations will suddenly stop
working.  However, the GeoMoose 2.9 demo (on
https://demo.geomoose.org/2.9) will be shutdown and the development team
won't have ready access to develop and test changes to the 2.x series. 
As such, the GeoMoose team recommends upgrading to GeoMoose 3.x.


Details:

GeoMoose 2.x requires old versions of Dojo (1.6) and OpenLayers (2.13). 
Neither of these libraries are currently under development or supported
upstream.  Updating to current versions of these libraries requires
major reworking of the GeoMoose 2.x code.  (In fact, this is what
prompted the development of the GeoMoose 3.x series).

The bigger problem is that PHP services shipped with GeoMoose 2.x
require PHP 5 and PHP MapScript.  These don't exist in recent Linux
distributions (e.g. Debian Stretch/Ubuntu 16.04 and newer).  The April
2019 date is set to coincide with Ubuntu 14.04 EOL.

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