Experimental cartographic library for Python

[Sean Gillies]

Greetings, fellow MapServing Pythoneers:

I am finally following through on my threat, or promise :),
to start a new and improved MapServer scripting package for Python.
My primary motivation is to improve my ZMapServer product and to
share the benefits with Python applications running on other
frameworks.

A introductory web page is at

     http://users.frii.com/sgillies/projects/PCL/mapping.html

API documentation generated by epydoc

     http://users.frii.com/sgillies/projects/PCL/html/

Source for an initial release

     http://users.frii.com/sgillies/projects/PCL/PCL-0.2.tar.gz

If the Python Cartographic Module interests you, please contact me
by email:

     <sgillies at frii dot com>

I am always open to suggestions, and would appreciate hearing about
your particular use cases. If you think that you'd like to contribute
your own programming resources, we can start to discuss the details
of your contribution and whether or not to upload the project to
Sourceforge.

Does this mean I am ending my contributions to and support for
MapServer?

Absolutely not.

Nor is this an attempt to fork MapServer.

The new module will rely heavily on MapServer and should help to
lead MapServer towards improvement in key areas.  I will continue
to work on SWIG mapscript bugs and useability issues, but will no
longer be advocating the kind of sweeping changes to the mapscript
API that you may have heard from me over beers at the past users
meeting :)

Once again, respond to me if interested so that we don't have
off topic emails on the mapserver-users and mapserver-dev lists.
I'll set up a new list if the response warrants.  I'm almost
always available on #mapserver irc.freenode.net for discussion.