exporting layers to OGC interfaces

[Daniel Morissette]

Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> I think Daniel's 
> point was that if one were building a mapfile and one did not INTEND to 
> support OGC services that one might not think to see if it is disabled 
> by default. I also think commercial services need to worry about people 
> figuring out that a site is mapserver driven and the smart people might 
> figure out how to use mapserver in ways the owners did not intend and 
> steal services that might impact services to paying clients.
> 

That's exactly what I had in mind, I just didn't express it as well as 
Steve just did.

I am usually against breaking backwards compatibility, but in this case 
I think it's required. If we leave all those OGC protocols open by 
default then that's assuming that all the newbies are aware that they 
need to put "ows_export none" in all their mapfiles in order to protect 
their data. That's completely backwards: you should not be required to 
disable something you don't need in order to protect your data, your 
data should be protected by default and you should be required to enable 
the protocols that you do want to offer explicitly.


> I do not think we should break compatibility just for the sake of 
> breaking it, but I do think we should do whatever is needed to clean 
> things up, rationalize APIs and interfaces and position mapserver for 
> the next 5 years.
> 

Not sure if we can solve all the known issues and align ourselves for 
the next 5 years, but a major release is definitely the best time for a 
couple of backwards-incompatible fixes.

This specific one is an easy fix and will be easy to document in a 5.0 
migration guide. We could even make the GetCapabilities for disabled 
protocols spit out an exception explaining that protocol WXS is not 
enabled in this server, check the ows_export setting, etc.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/