5.0-beta1 tomorrow ...

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi everyone,

As per our release plan, we had the feature freeze yesterday night. 
Thanks to everyone for making sure their latest features were committed 
on time. now we start the process of stabilizing the code base for the 
next few weeks.

The next step is to release 5.0-beta1 tomorrow. I would like to tag the 
source and prepare beta1 tomorrow around noon EDT, so I would appreciate 
if you could avoid making build-breaking changes around that time.

Jeff, Frank, do you think you'll be available to make 5.0-beta1 builds 
available for FGS and MS4W sometimes later in the day tomorrow?

Finally, I have tried to compile a highlight of the most important 
features and enhancements in this release based on the list of RFCs. I 
will use that to introduce the upcoming release in an announcement to 
mapserver-users tomorrow. Could you please all have a look at the list 
(below) and send me any correction or let me know if I missed anything 
important?

Thanks

Daniel


MapServer 5.0
=============

New features:
------------

- MS RFC 19: Added Style and Label attribute binding

- MS RFC 21: Raster Color Correction via color lookup table

- MS RFC 27: Added label priority

- MS RFC 29: Added dynamic charting (pie and bar charts)

- MS RFC 32: Added support for map rendering using the AGG library for
   better output quality


Long time issues resolved:
-------------------------

- MS RFC 17: Use dynamic allocation for symbols, layers, classes and styles
   (got rid of the static limit on the number of instances of each in a map)

- MS RFC 24: Improved memory management and garbage collection for MapScript

- MS RFC 26: Terminology cleanup (layer transparency renamed to opacity,
   scale becomes scaledenom, symbol style becomes symbol pattern)

- MS RFC 28: Enhanced the debug/logging mechanism to facilitate
   troubleshooting and tuning applications (RFC-28)

- MS RFC 31: New mechanism to load/set objects via URL using mapfile syntax


Not sure ???:
------------

- MS RFC 25: Align MapServer pixel and extent models with OGC models