[mapguide-internals] MapGuide 2.3 and FOSS4G 2011

[Trevor Wekel]

Hi list,

FOSS4G 2011 is being held in Denver this year on September 12th to 16th.  One of the deliverables for FOSS4G is the OSGeo Live DVD.  MapGuide is present on the DVD.  To get the DVD burned before the conference starts, all projects on the DVD need to have final versions of their product(s) ready by mid-August.  From the project schedule http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tMRaCwabv7SiIG3moHEfMrQ&hl=en_GB# they will be targeting Ubuntu 11 as the platform.

I think native compilation on Ubuntu 11 (32bit?) will be required for a successful deployment due to changing versions of distro packages used by FDO and MapGuide.  I believe we will also need to base our code drop on MapGuide trunk and FDO 3.6.  The recent library upgrades (Berkeley DB mostly) will get us closer to native compilation.  Ideally, the binaries on OSGeo Live should be officially released software.

MapGuide 2.2 is nearly out the door (I'm about to start the RC4 build...) so a MapGuide 2.3 release in August would be roughly six months between releases.  If we work back from a 2.3 Final in mid-August with two weeks between RCs and a 1 month beta, the timeline would look something like:

June 6 MapGuide 2.3 Beta
July 4 MapGuide 2.3 RC1
July 18 MapGuide 2.3 RC2
August 1 MapGuide 2.3 RC3
August 15 MapGuide 2.3 Final Release 

Based on some offline feedback I have received from the community, it would be good to provide binaries for the following platforms:

Windows 32bit
Windows 64bit
RHEL 5 32bit
RHEL 6 32bit
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32 bit
Ubuntu 11 32 bit (for OSGeo Live)

(stretch goal - add 64 bit for Linux)
RHEL 5 64bit
RHEL 6 64bit
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64 bit

Additional hardware purchases (ie. another server) will give us enough capacity to handle all these platforms.  The real question comes down to developer resources.  This will be a monumental undertaking, especially since we need to do FDO and MapGuide builds.  That's a total of 18 builds (MapGuide and FDO on 9 platforms each).  If we factor in automation, Windows installers and Linux rpm/deb packagers this feels like a six month commitment for a senior developer.  Unfortunately, this would also be six months of unpaid work since our Sponsorship program hasn't taken off yet.


Do we want to do this?

Can we do this?  


Regards,
Trevor