[geos-devel] Next GEOS release

[strk at refractions.net]

Dear hackers, 
It's been a long time since last GEOS release (August).
Since then, there's been very low activity in the 2.1 branch
and lots of changes in the HEAD branch.

Most changed in HEAD have been ABI breaking.
A few also changed API but mainly of internal classes.

To avoid future problems with ABI/API breakage we implemented
a simplified API that can be used by C code and (thanks to
Frank) work on win32 as well.

This means that everyone willing to avoid future rebuild (and
most likely adaptations) of client applications will be able to
link against the C-API wrapper, which will be kept binary-compatible
by subsequent GEOS releases.

The whole point of this is being able to freely mess with
internal interfaces in order to privide performance improvements
w/out penalty for users. Anyway, not much have been done yet
with the internals.

So. The question for you is: do you think it's worth releasing
GEOS 2.2.0 now and concentrate in deep improvements for 2.2.1 ?

In the transition between 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 client applications linked
against the C-API won't need a rebuild, while client applications
linked against the *huge* libgeos.so library will likely need it.

Comments, ideas ?

--strk;