[Mapserver-users] Some improvement might be done for the mapserver's documentation .

[pond bear]

Hi, everybody

I will attend the first MapServer Users Meeting on St. Paul Campus of the 
University of Minnesota. So we will meet there. See you.

I have used mapserver for half a year and met a lot difficuties in 
installation and compilation. The documentations about mapserver 
installation on Linux is very misleading. To save you time, here is a list 
of suggestions I will recommend to add into Mapserver help files.

1.  Mapserver3.7 requires GD2.0.12 or up, which is important but not 
mentioned in " MapServer Unix Compilation and Installation Howto".

2. There still is a "Mapplet Howto" while mapplet has been upgraded to jbox. 
Replacing it with "jbox howto" will be more helpful.

3. Many people have mentioned the problem "Can't find XXXX.so" after 
installing mapserver, which is due to the library not in the searching path. 
Maybe we can add following  in "Mapserver Unix Compilation and Installation 
Howto":

Add a line in httpd.conf
"setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH 
/lib:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/home/oracle/OraHome1/lib"

4. "Mapserver PHP/Mapscript Installation Howto" doesn't mention PHP must be 
compiled as a CGI program in Linux, which is the only way we have found to 
get php work with mapserver.

5. "MapFile Reference - MapServer 3.7" fails to mention the new features 
such as DATAPATTERN, which is one of the most important new features of 3.7.

6. In turtorial and Demo, the input image type is gif which can't be handled 
by mapserver with the default configuration of  GD (no gif support). Why not 
make a new version of turtorial and demo using PNG as input image?

Jing

University of North Dakota.

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