[Mapserver-dev] WMS and LAYERS= vs. STATUS Behaviour

[Jean-Henry Berevoescu]

Daniel Morissette wrote:

> Bart van den Eijnden wrote:
>
>> I think users of Mapserver should be discouraged to use STATUS 
>> DEFAULT in combination with the WMS interface. The best way to 
>> discourage them is to provide a warning in the capabilities XML in my 
>> opinion.
>>
>
> Well, do we want to discourage them that badly?  There may be 
> legitimate uses of status default as mentioned in a previous email 
> (for a copyright notice or a watermark for instance), and in this case 
> the warning could become a real pain.

As noted in previous mails of this thread, there are indeed legitimate 
uses of this feature and for comercial uses Copyrights, Watermarks and 
Logos are in most cases I am familiar with absolutely necessary.

>
> There have been discussions before about adding something to prevent 
> some layers from being listed/served via WMS.  Perhaps we could use 
> this in combination with your warning idea??? (i.e. we produce the 
> warning for status default, and if someone really knows what they're 
> doing then they can hide their layers that have status default to 
> avoid the warning.)

I was wondering if the DEFAULT notion is not actually misleading (I was 
definitely interpreting it the wrong way when I first read about it). 
Maybe leaving the DEFAULT as a deprecated value and adding one that 
conveys the meaning through a significant name (e.g. ALWAYSON) will do a 
better job in the future.

Jean