[postgis-users] PostGIS 1.4.0 Beta 1

[Paul Ramsey]

The PostGIS team is super happy to announce that a beta release of
PostGIS 1.4.0 is now available for download and testing!

  http://postgis.refractions.net/download/postgis-1.4.0b1.tar.gz

The 1.4 series includes a large number of new features, fixes,
speed-ups and mini chocolate chip cookies.

PostGIS 1.4 is best consumed along side helpings of the latest Proj4
and GEOS libraries:

  http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.6.1.tar.gz
  http://download.osgeo.org/geos/geos-3.1.0.tar.bz2

We appreciate all possible testing and feed-back you can provide to
make the upcoming 1.4 release a high quality affair. The sooner we get
feedback, the sooner we can release 1.4.0!

Here are some more details about 1.4:

 - API Stability
   - As of the 1.4 release series, the public API of PostGIS will not
         change during minor releases.

 - Compatibility
   - The versions below are the *minimum* requirements for PostGIS 1.4
   - PostgreSQL 8.2 and higher on all platforms
   - GEOS 3.0 and higher only
   - PROJ4 4.5 and higher only

 - New Features
   - ST_Union() uses high-speed cascaded union when compiled against
         GEOS 3.1+ (Paul Ramsey)
   - ST_ContainsProperly() requires GEOS 3.1+
   - ST_Intersects(), ST_Contains(), ST_Within() use high-speed cached
         prepared geometry against GEOS 3.1+ (Paul Ramsey)
   - Vastly improved documentation and reference manual
         (Regina Obe & Kevin Neufeld)
   - Figures and diagram examples in the reference manual (Kevin Neufeld)
   - ST_IsValidReason() returns readable explanations for validity
         failures (Paul Ramsey)
   - ST_GeoHash() returns a geohash.org signature for geometries
         (Paul Ramsey)
   - GTK+ multi-platform GUI for shape file loading (Paul Ramsey)
   - ST_LineCrossingDirection() returns crossing directions (Paul Ramsey)
   - ST_LocateBetweenElevations() returns sub-string based on Z-ordinate.
         (Paul Ramsey)
   - Geometry parser returns explicit error message about location of
         syntax errors (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - ST_AsGeoJSON() return JSON formatted geometry (Olivier Courtin)
   - Populate_Geometry_Columns() -- automatically add records to
         geometry_columns for TABLES and VIEWS (Kevin Neufeld)

 - Enhancements
   - Core geometry system moved into independent library, liblwgeom.
         (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - New build system uses PostgreSQL "pgxs" build bootstrapper.
         (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - Debugging framework formalized and simplified. (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - All build-time #defines generated at configure time and placed in
         headers for easier cross-platform support (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - Logging framework formalized and simplified (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - Expanded and more stable support for CIRCULARSTRING,
         COMPOUNDCURVE and CURVEPOLYGON, better parsing, wider support
         in functions (Mark Leslie & Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - Improved support for OpenSolaris builds (Paul Ramsey)
   - Improved support for MSVC builds (Mateusz Loskot)
   - Updated KML support (Olivier Courtin)
   - Unit testing framework for liblwgeom (Paul Ramsey)
   - New testing framework to comprehensively exercise every PostGIS
         function (Regine Obe)
   - Performance improvements to all geometry aggregate functions
         (Paul Ramsey)
   - Support for the upcoming PostgreSQL 8.4 (Mark Cave-Ayland, Talha Bin
         Rizwan)
   - Shp2pgsql and pgsql2shp re-worked to depend on the common
         parsing/unparsing code in liblwgeom (Mark Cave-Ayland)
   - Use of PDF DbLatex to build PDF docs and preliminary instructions
     for build  (Jean David Techer)
   - Automated User documentation build (PDF and HTML) and
     Developer Doxygen Documentation (Kevin Neufeld)
   - Automated build of document images using ImageMagick
     from WKT geometry text files (Kevin Neufeld)
   - More attractive CSS for HTML documentation (Dane Springmeyer)
 - Bug fixes
   - http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/query?status=closed&milestone=postgis+1.4.0&order=priority