[postgis-users] Roadmap for next major release of PostGIS

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Attila Csipa wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 May 2008 19:19:05 Chris Hermansen wrote:
>> I'm sad to see that a newer version of GEOS didn't make it to 8.04.  I
>> If I'm wrong in my assumption - heck, maybe there are good reasons to
>> prefer Geos 2.2.x against the most up to date release - please feel free
>> to chastise me firmly!
> 
> You will find that almost all web-mapping/gis related packages in Ubuntu 8.04 
> are far from bleeding edge (GDAL 1.4.4, Mapserver 5.0, Mapnik 0.4) so I don't 
> think it is a single package slip-up but rather a choice for a whole bunch. 
> It might have to do something with 8.04 being a LTS (Long Term Support) 
> release, but don't take my word for it.

This is pretty standard behavior for all distribution. Their goal is a 
stable release across a large number of packages that they can maintain 
for a long while. Sysadmins and IT folks are more concerned with broad 
based stability and security that with having any one vertical stack 
that is current/bleeding edge.

This in fact works mostly well for me, in that I don't like having to 
worry about my OS and infrastructure in general. What I find frustrating 
is that it is a major pain to get the current/bleeding edge packages for 
a vertical GIS stack built in an older stable environment as packages 
that can be deployed easily into a production environment.

In most cases, the production environment does not have compliers and 
dev libs and headers and such installed. So you have to have a build box 
with all that stuff. In Debian I have backported some packages in the 
past, but then Debian changed the packaging tools, which made it really 
difficult to do the backports at that time. I haven't tried on a more 
recent versions in a while.

Anyway, I would not hold your breath for this to change.

-Steve W