MapServer 4.8.0-beta2 released

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi everyone,

Time has come for a MapServer 4.8 release. We are already at the second 
beta and due to a little timing problem, I failed to announce beta1 a 
few weeks ago.

Anyway, today MapServer 4.8.0-beta2 is available. Our current plan is to 
have the 4.8.0 release done by mid-December. More details on the release 
plan are available at 
http://ms.gis.umn.edu/development/release_plans/mapserver_4_8/

For the impatients, the source package is available at the usual 
location: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/dload.html
Windows binaries should be made available at the usual locations shortly.

Since the creation of the MapServer Technical Steering Committee in 
August, new features are now tracked via RFC documents. You can browse 
the complete list of RFCs at http://ms.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc

The relevant RFCs for the 4.8 release are:

  * MS RFC 2: Creating line features and/or shapes using WKT
  * MS RFC 3: Layer Plug-in Architecture
  * MS RFC 4: MapServer Raster Resampling
  * MS RFC 5: MapServer Horizon Reprojection Improvements
  * MS RFC 6: Color Range Mapping of Continuous Feature Values
  * MS RFC 8: Pluggable External Feature Layer Providers

Once again, all the details are available in the RFC documents at the 
URL above.

Of course, this release also brings a large number of small enhancements 
and bug fixes that didn't deserve their own RFC. I have included a copy 
of the list of changes/fixes from the HISTORY.TXT at the end of this 
message.

Oh, and finally, another piece of news is that we are planning to switch 
to the new Plone site at the same time as the 4.8 release (preview 
available at http://ms.gis.umn.edu/). The most up to date documentation 
for the 4.8 release will be found on this site and not in the old blue site.

Best Regards,

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


Version 4.8.0-beta2 (2005-11-23)
--------------------------------

- Use dynamic allocation for ellipse symbol's STYLE array, avoiding the
   static limitation on the STYLE argument values. (bug 1539)

- Fix bug in mapproject.c when splitting over the horizon lines.

- Fix Tcl mapscript's getBytes method (bug 1533).

- Use mapscript.i in-place when building Ruby mapscript, copying not 
necessary
   (bug 1528).

- Expose maximum lengths of layer, class, and style arrays in mapscript (bug
   1522).

- correct msGetVersion to indicate if mapserver was build with MYGIS 
support.

- Fixed hang in msProjectRect() for very small rectangles due to round off
   problems (bug 1526).


Version 4.8.0-beta1 (2005-11-04)
--------------------------------

- Bug 1509: Fixed bounding box calculation in mapresample.c. The bottom 
right
   corner was being missed in the calculation.

- MS RFC 2: added OGR based shape<->WKT implementation.

- mapgdal.c: fixed some mutex lock release issues on error conditions.

- MS RFC 8: External plugin layer providers (bug 1477)

- SLD : syntax error when auto generating external symbols (Bug 1508).

- MS RFC 3: Layer vtable architecture (bug 1477)

- wms time : correct a problem when hadling wms times with tile index 
rasters
   (bug 1506).

- WMS TIME : Add suuport for multiple interval extents (Bug  1498)

- Removed deprecated --with-php-regex-dir switch (bug 1468)

- support wms_attribution element for LAYER's (Bug 1502)

- Correct php/mapscript bug : initialization of scale happens when
   preparequery is called (Bug 1334).

- msProjectShape() will now project the lines it can, but completely
   delete lines that cannot be projected properly and "NULL" the shape if
   there are no lines left. (Bug 411)

- Expose msLayerWhichShapes and msLayerNextShape in MapScript. (bug 1481)

- Added support to MapScript to change images in a previously defined
   symbol. (bug 1471)

- mapogcfiler.c : bug 1490. Crash when size of sld filters was huge.

- Fixed --enable-point-z-m fix in configure.in (== -> =) (bug 1485).

- Extra scalebar layer creation is prevented with a typo fix in mapscale.c.
   Good catch, Tamas (bug 1480).

- mapwmslayer.c : use transparency set at the layer level on wms client
                   layers  (Bug 1458)

- mapresample.c: added BILINEAR/AVERAGE resampling options.

- mapfile.c: avoid tail recursion in freeFeatureList().

- maplegend.c: fixed leak of imageObj when embedding legends.

- msGDALCleanup(): better error handler cleanup.

- Modified msResetErrorList() to free the last error link too, to ensure
   msCleanup() scrubs all error related memory.

- Fix in msGetGDALGetTransform() to use default geotransform even if
   GDALGetGeoTransform() fails but alters the geotransform array.

- Typemaps for C# to enable imageObj.getBytes() method (bug 1389).

- Enable -DUSE_ZLIB via configure for compressed SVG output (bug 1307).

- maputil.c/msAddLine(): rewrite msAddLine() to call
   msAddLineDirectly, and use realloc() in msAddLineDirectly() to optimize
   growth of shapeObjs. (bug 1432)

- msTmpFile: ensure counter is incremented to avoid duplicate
   temporary filenames. (bug 1312)

- SLD external graphic symbol format tests now for mime type
   like image/gif instead of just GIF. (bug 1430)

- Added support for OGR layers to use SQL type filers (bug 1292)

- mapio/cgiutil - fixed POST support in fastcgi mode. (bug 1259)

- mapresample.c - ensure that multi-band raw results can be
   resampled. (bug 1372)

- Add support in OGC FE for matchCase attribute on
   PropertyIsEqual and PropertyIsLike  (bug 1416)

- Fixed sortshp.c to free shapes after processing to avoid major
   memory leak. (bug 1418)

- fixed msHTTPInit() not ever being called which prevented msHTTPCleanup()
   from properly cleaning up cUrl with curl_global_cleanup(). (bug 1417)

- mapsde.c: add thread locking in msSDELCacheAdd

- fixed mappool.c so that any thread can release a connection,
   not just it's allocator. (bug 1402)

- mapthread.c/h: Added TLOCK_SDE and TLOCK_ORACLE - not used yet.

- Fixed copying of layer and join items. (bug 1403)

- Fixed copying of processing directives within copy of a layer. (bug 1399)

- Problems with string initialization. (bug 1312)

- Fix svg output for multipolygons. (bug 1390)

- Added querymapObj to PHP MapScript (bug 535)