State of MapServer...

[Stephen Lime]

Man, lots of traffic on the list these days and all good conversation. I'm all in favor of
getting more people involved in actual code development, but now is not the right time.
Perhaps with MapServer 4- which is on the horizon. As always I/we or whatever will
solicit input from the user community. The mailing list numbers 230+ so clearly something
is being done right.

SourceForge - Unless the University can't or won't house the project I see no reason
to move. Being one of 10,000 projects doesn't sound appealing. A fast, robust CVS
server is key and the UMN can provide that. Certainly other tools could/should be 
employed for bug tracking and I'll encourage the UMN to get one running. Bugzilla seems
to be pretty good. Other suggestions are of course welcome. A running change log is part
of CVS.

The biggest need I see is more detailed examples and documentation. Functionality is such
that most users aren't pushing the software. I think the primary reason is that most just aren't
aware of possiblities (or my current docs suck). That was the reason for the original call for
volunteers. What I propose is to move the documentation and demo portions of the main
mapserver site into CVS with sub-groups of MapServer users responsible for updates and
additions. With the main demo and the test suite there is enough to start from, same goes 
for the docs. It's important to not have only those doing coding involved. Often I'm so tied
to the code I can't anticipate issues that those using it can. That's why Perry's demo instructions
are far better than I could write. The University is setting up 2 new mailing lists to direct documentation
and demo development: mapserver-demo and mapserver-docs. When those are ready I'll make
another call for participation.

I really like Perry's demo "howto" and would like to see a bunch of these written (i.e. howto add
the mapplet applet, howto use projections and so on). Works for RedHad anyway.

What do folks think?

Steve

Stephen Lime
Internet Applications Analyst

Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-297-2937