[mapserver-users] upgrade Mapserver 5.4 to 6.0 (gulp!)

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 6/9/2011 8:58 AM, Chris Green wrote:
> Hi All
>
> I have been running Mapserver 5.4 for about 18 months on a Fedora core 7
> Unix platform. I installed it via the FGS installer package which made
> the installation process relatively straightforward.
>
> Now I see that Mapserver 6.0 has been released and it includes some
> features that I really want to take advantage of, particularly the
> ability to cluster dense features. My problem is that apparently the FGS
> package has not been updated, so from the Mapserver website it looks
> like I have start from scratch with a scarily long list of libraries and
> compilations required to install Mapserver 6.0 from scratch. As
> something of a Unix novice I don’t fancy this very much!
>
> I am wondering if there is a simple way to in effect replace my existing
> Mapserver 5.4 executable with Mapserver 6.0 - could I assume that
> Mapserver 6.0 only requires the same libraries as 5.4 and just compile
> the 6.0 executable? Any guidance on the direction to take here would be
> gratefully received.

Hi Chris,

Be aware that 5.4 to 6.0 is probably NOT a transparent upgrade from a 
mapfile point of view. Make sure you read the mapserver migration guide. 
One of the big changes that we made in 6.0 was to clean up some of the 
mapfile syntax and remove some deprecated tags. These should not be 
major changes but it is likely that some (all?) of your mapfiles will 
need to be tweaked to get them to work.

So please plan accordingly.

-Steve W