[mapserver-dev] 5.6.0 release announcement

[Daniel Morissette]

Following up on this discussion, I had to fix a last minute data leak 
issue found in ticket 2941 and retag + repackage the source. (BTW, I 
agreed to do this given the fact it was a security issue and the release 
had not been announced yet, but I just found out that this repackaging 
of the 5.6.0 source caused an issue with the DebianGIS and Ubuntu 
packages which were already built: we are not allowed to update a source 
archive once it has been uploaded to their servers. We may have to rush 
a 5.6.1 release to resolve this with them.)

And on the docs side, we have started working on some of the issues of 
current SVN trunk docs with Jeff and Alan, so we need a bit of time to 
polish that before branching and publishing the trunk docs live (i.e. we 
cannot push the trunk docs live now, this is option 2 from Jeff's 
original email).

So unless I hear objections, I'd like to send the release announcement 
and be done with it by Monday at the latest (for real this time). Please 
see the (new) proposed announcement that takes your feedback into 
account, and let me know ASAP if there are any issues:

------------

The MapServer Team is pleased to announce the release of version 5.6.0. 
This new release contains a few new features and performance 
enhancements. Here is a quick summary:

New features in 5.6:

   * MS RFC 51: XML Mapfile schema and XSLT (see 
http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/wiki/XMLMapfiles)
   * MS RFC 52: One-pass query processing, making WFS queries on 
database backends much much faster
   * MS RFC 55: Improve control of output resolution, allows printing 
maps at printer resolution using a mapfile defined for screen resolution
   * MS RFC 57: Labeling enhancements: ability to repeat labels along a 
line/multiline

(RFCs are available online at http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/)

Other notable enhancements include:

   * Security fixes (also backported to 5.4):
     * Improved security relative to untrusted directories and mapfiles 
(RFC 56)
     * Fixed several security issues found in an audit of the CGI 
application (#2939, #2941, #2942, #2943, #2944)
   * Performance optimizations:
     * Load all GDAL image bands in one pass for faster processing (r9260)
     * Optimized access to very large shapefiles (#2930)
   * Several enhancements/fixes to OGC Web Services specs support
   * Several enhancements/fixes to all flavors of MapScript

As usual there an a large number of additional small enhancements and 
bug fixes. For a complete list see the HISTORY.TXT file at:


http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/browser/tags/rel-5-6-0/mapserver/HISTORY.TXT

A 5.4 -> 5.6 migration guide is also available. It should become part of 
the official documentation soon, but in the meantime you can view the 
latest version online at:


http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/browser/branches/branch-5-6/mapserver/MIGRATION_GUIDE.TXT

The release source code can be downloaded at:

   http://mapserver.org/download.html OR
   http://download.osgeo.org/mapserver/mapserver-5.6.0.tar.gz

Existing MS4W 3.0 users can upgrade to this MapServer 5.6.0 release by
following instructions at
http://www.maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml?page=RELEASE_mapserver_ms4w3.x_dev-5.6.0.html

Ubuntu Binaries for hardy, jaunty and karmic are also built and 
available in the unstable PPA of UbuntuGIS:
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntugis/+archive/ubuntugis-unstable/


Finally, with respect to documentation, the MapServer documentation team 
is continuing to update and maintain documents, and the live 
mapserver.org website should be updated with the updated 5.6 
documentation soon.  One of the things that the team has been working on 
is a structure for translated documents.  The structure is now in place 
in the development version of the site, but volunteers are needed to 
translate pages into other languages.  The documentation team asks that 
those volunteers interested in translating documents to please send a 
message to the mapserver-dev email list.

Enjoy! - The MapServer Team