[Mapserver-dev] FastCGI and MapServer 4.4

[Daniel Morissette]

Sean Gillies wrote:
> 
> I think that we should reserve some time to shake the bugs out after
> the new connection pooling and make sure that it is ready for use with
> mapscript before releasing 4.4.
> 

Well, if it's compiled out then that may not be necessary. Compiled out 
means to me that the code is there, but shouldn't be considered part of 
the release: it's only there for those who know what they're doing. This 
is what was done with the WCS code in 4.2: the WCS stuff was there, but 
was not considered part of the release and was disabled so that only 
those who knew what they were doing could try to enable it.

How about the following: 4.4 could have connection pooling available 
only for FCGI (and compiled-out by default), and 4.5/4.6 could bring 
enhancements to MapScript to take advantage of connection pooling. 
Unless of course your changes to MapScript would be minimal and could be 
done fairly quickly. I fear that if all this is ported to MapScript and 
all, then it becomes impossible to keep things compiled out in 4.4 by 
default.


> The 4.2.0 release was somewhat broken.  Maybe we could agree if we'd
> like the 4.4.0 to be more or less bug free, and ask if a longer period
> between feature freeze and release than last time will help?
> 

4.0 was broken, but I always felt that 4.2 was a very good release. I 
guess it depends on how you look at it. What do you consider a broken 
release?

I agree that we need some time after the code freeze to address any bugs 
that may be found, but we have to keep in mind that the world doesn't 
stop to turn while we're in the release process, so we can't take too 
long before we release. We have to either branch early and constantly 
make fixes in two branches, or block new developments for a while until 
we consider the software stable enough to branch the stable release.

In the case of 4.2, the time between the code freeze (And CVS branch) 
and official release was 5 weeks: beta1 on April 17, followed by beta2 
and beta3, and finally 4.2.0 on May 25th. And the resulting 4.2 wasn't 
bad at all in my opinion. I was hoping that we could do the same for 4.4.

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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