[mapguide-internals] Re: [mapguide-users] Problem with OS Geo FDOProviderfor Raster.

[Frank Warmerdam]

Andy Morsell wrote:
> I also agree that enhancing raster functionality is going to
> be critical for the future of MGOS and other applications and will look for
> additional funding from clients needing this added functionality.  I would
> also be willing to independently contribute some of my own (company) dollars
> to functionality enhancements like this if there is a good road map with
> detailed functional specs (similar to our RFC's) and timelines to be adhered
> to.  In the end, it would result in functionality that would be appealing to
> my clients and should would lead to future work.  How can we effectively
> start to build these buckets of dollars from potentially multiple
> contributors and prioritize the enhancement needs?

Folks,

First, let me say that I am prepared to build some reasonable sort of
"tileindexing" into the GDAL raster provider without additional funding,
though I am not guaranteeing a particular timeline.  Presumably this will
follow the mechanism planned for the autodesk raster provider where extents
are added to the xml config document.  This should allow the gdal provider
to scan the config document, and use this determine which actual tiles
to access for a particular map request.

However, I'm not completely certain that this will scale to datasources
with 50000 individual files.  I think some sort of further step may be
required for this sort of dataset.  That might require funding, but I'd
like to put off such an effort till we have at least explored the limits
of the config file based approach.

More generally I would like to see MapGuide and FDO consider participating
in the OSGeo Project Sponsorship program:

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Project_Sponsorship

This would essentially provide a mechanism to manage sponsorship for
maintenance and improvements to MapGuide and FDO.  In our context I think
the concept of "earmarked sponsorships" might be especially useful.  In
this context, the PSC would define a "desirable task", possibly as a
proper RFC, and would then approve the task as something for which
sponsorship is sought.  Presumably in combination with a consultant or
organization offering to do the described task for a specific price.

Obvious candidates for such tasks would include new FDO providers, major
improvements to web studio or improvements to mapguide that are not a
corporate priority for Autodesk for some reason.

We might also consider "general" sponsorship for the project(s) which might
be spent by the PSC on various kinds of maintenance, producing current
binaries for all platforms, porting to new platforms, and fixing bugs in
the components not directly taken care of by Autodesk (ie. web studio,
and some fdo providers).

I would hope that the various integrators, and end-users making use of
MapGuide open source would find sponsorship at either the "earmarked"
level, or the general level of interest as a way of ensuring that
MapGuide OS is made as useful as it can be.

Best regards,
--
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org