[mapserver-dev] Out of Box MapServer

[Paul Ramsey]

Daniel is trying to avoid scope creep in his simple viewing thread, so
I'm going to start a new one.

I think the main reason there isn't a good "out of the box" MapServer
experience yet is because there is no 'make install' target. Weird
hey?

If there was a 'make install' you could install the CGI directly into
cgi-bin, and install support files, like a standard set of styles, a
standard set of fonts, some standard templates, some basic data, even
some HTML files with documentation and whatnot. Linux packagers could
then say to themselves, "OK, I will have the etc directory be this on,
the share directory be this one, I'll drop the CGI into the system CGI
directory here, and now I am set to build an RPM/DEB/whatever". Other
OSes would do similar stuff, and each copy of MapServer would have a
similar expectation of "what-is-expected-to-exist-by-default".

Once you have something more than the CGI available being installed by
default, the amount of user-friendliness you can implement across all
platforms goes up quite quickly.

For exampleness, 'make install' for example on RHEL

/var/www/cgi-bin/mapserv
/var/www/htdocs/mapserver/docs
/var/www/htdocs/mapserver/examples
/etc/mapserv.conf
/usr/share/mapserver
/usr/share/mapserver/symbols
/usr/share/mapserver/fonts
/usr/share/mapserver/templates
/usr/share/mapserver/data
/usr/docs/mapserver

What do you think?

Paul