[mapserver-dev] Motion: Retire SDE Support for MapServer 7.0

[Howard Butler]

All,

As the former maintainer and current non-maintainer of the SDE MapServer driver, I would like to motion that we we retire it from MapServer for the upcoming release. There are three reasons to consider removal at this time:

1) Availability of the ArcSDE SDK is extremely low (can you even get ESRI to give it to you?)
2) Viability of direct-database query from PostGIS, Oracle, and SQL Server have obsoleted SDE
3) No current MapServer developers have the ability to test any code changes to the SDE driver.

Howard