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

[Howard Butler]

> On Feb 11, 2015, at 10:40 AM, Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com> wrote:
> 
> Even, Thank you for the additional info in the SDE options.
> 
> We might want to put out an inquiry to the user lists to see with there are people using these and what version of software they are using it against. In general if the community is not using/supporting a feature then I see no reason to continue carrying it if we (the community) can not verify that it works and is useful. That said, I think we should give due notification that we are planning to drop it and why.

Whether or not we've *officially* stopped supporting SDE, we have *functionally* stopped supporting it for quite a while due to the mix of factors I've described. IMO, the only users who are going to care about this item are those looking to check a box of "MapServer can do ...", and not real, in-the-wild users of the plugin.

I think we should notify at the 7.0 beta release, and if someone is screaming so much to put it back, they've volunteered to make it happen because they have the resources to do so. We can't continue to support it in the blind, especially if it is expected that some of the more complex interactions like JOINs and OGC filtering actually works.

Howard