[MapProxy] Roadmap for 0.8 and 0.9

[Oliver Tonnhofer]

Hi,

I want to give you all a short update on the roadmap for MapProxy.

0.8
===

We are putting the 0.8 version into maintenance mode. 0.8.3 is the  
current stable release and we do not plan to add any major new  
features to this version. We will make bug-fix releases if necessary,  
though.

0.9
===

We are using the pre-1.0 status of MapProxy to do some major changes.

Configuration
-------------

The biggest change of all is that we will modify the configuration  
layout. It will be slightly more complex but way more flexible.

A small example:
http://bitbucket.org/olt/mapproxy/src/tip/mapproxy/core/paster_templates/templates/etc/services.yaml

Some benefits of the new configuration:
Most global options, like image resampling and meta_size, will be  
configurable for each cache; you will be able to reuse parts of the  
configuration, like grid or source definitions; and there will be a  
single configuration instead of two (service.yaml and proxy.yaml).

Unfortunately, this change is backwards incompatible with 0.8. But,  
the change will make it easier to grow (in features) and allows us to  
make future releases backwards compatible.


Less dependencies
-----------------

We removed two dependencies that required a C compiler. The only  
dependency that requires compilation is now the Python Image Library  
(PIL). If you use PIL from your system distribution (pythin-imaging on  
Debian/Ubuntu) you will no longer need a compiler during installation.

We switched the templates away from Jinja2 to Tempita, a minimal  
Python-only template engine. It is a bit slower, but it is only used  
for capability documents.

The other dependency wich required compilation was pyproj. We we added  
a wrapper to MapProxy that directly uses libproj, the Proj4 C-library.  
libproj is available on most systems and should already be installed  
when you use software like MapServer or PostGIS. There is a fallback  
to pyproj, i.e. you can still use the binary distribution of pyproj on  
Windows.


Code reorganization
-------------------

We are rearranging the package structure of MapProxy. We'll remove the  
core package, and try to group everything more consistent. It  
shouldn't bother you, if you do not develop on MapProxy. I will push  
the updated code to bitbucket later this day.

We created a branch for the 0.8 development:
http://bitbucket.org/olt/mapproxy/src/0.8.x/

All 0.9 development goes into the default branch.


Regards,
Oliver

-- 
Oliver Tonnhofer <olt at omniscale.de>
Omniscale - Dominik Helle, Oliver Tonnhofer GbR
Nadorster Str. 60, 26123 Oldenburg
Tel: +49(0)441/9392774-2 (Fax: 9)