[postgis-users] PostGIS 1.5.0 Released

[Paul Ramsey]

February 4, 2010

The PostGIS development team has, after a long course of reflection
and a detailed self-examination of our various personal failings,
decided to release PostGIS 1.5.0 to the public.

  http://postgis.org/download/postgis-1.5.0.tar.gz

This new version of PostGIS includes a new "geography" type for
managing geodetic (lat/lon) data, performance-enhanced distance
calculations, GML and KML format readers, an improved shape loading
GUI, and other new features as well.

Especial thanks to:

* Dave Skea for algorithms and mathematics necessary to support
spherical geometry
* Nicklas Avén for the new performance enhanced distance calculations
and other distance-related functions
* Sandro Santilli for new buffering features (end caps and style options)
* Olivier Courtin for GML/KML input functions
* Guillaume Lelarge for support for the upcoming PgSQL 9.0
* George Silva for an example implementation of history tables
* Vincent Picavet for Hausdorff distance calculations
* The maintainers of GEOS, Proj4, and LibXML, without whom we would
have less of a spatial database

Love, the PostGIS project steering committee,

Mark Cave-Ayland
Kevin Neufeld
Regina Obe
Paul Ramsey


----- Release Notes ----

PostGIS 1.5.0
2010/02/04

  * Important Changes *

  - =~ operator now indicates bounding box equality, not feature equality
  - GEOS 3.1 is now the minimum accepted version of GEOS
  - GEOS 3.2 is needed if you want to use enhanced buffering features
    and ST_HausdorffDistance
  - GEOS, LibXML2, and Proj4 are now mandatory dependencies

  * New Features *

  - Added Hausdorff distance calculations (#209) (Vincent Picavet)
  - Added parameters argument to ST_Buffer operation to support one-sided
    buffering and other buffering styles (Sandro Santilli)
  - Performance improvements to ST_Distance (Nicklas Avén)
  - Addition of other Distance related visualization and analysis
    functions (Nicklas Avén)
    - ST_ClosestPoint
    - ST_DFullyWithin
    - ST_LongestLine
    - ST_MaxDistance
    - ST_ShortestLine
  - KML, GML input via ST_GeomFromGML and ST_GeomFromKML (Olivier Courtin)
  - Extract homogeneous collection with ST_CollectionExtract (Paul Ramsey)
  - Add measure values to existing linestring with ST_AddMeasure (Paul Ramsey)
  - History table implementation in utils (George Silva)
  - Win32 support and improvement of core shp2pgsql-gui (Mark Cave-Ayland)
  - In place 'make check' support (Paul Ramsey)
  - Geography type and supporting functions
    - Spherical algorithms from Dave Skea
    - Object/index implementation from Paul Ramsey
    - Selectivitiy implementation from Mark Cave-Ayland
    - Serializations (KML, GML, JSON) from Olivier Courtin
    - ST_Area, ST_Distance, ST_DWithin, ST_GeogFromText, ST_GeogFromWKB,
      ST_Intersects, ST_Covers, ST_Buffer
  - Documentation updates and improvements (Regina Obe, Kevin Neufeld)
  - Testing and quality control (Regina Obe)
  - PostGIS 1.5 support PostgreSQL 8.5 trunk (Guillaume Lelarge)
   - Many many other changes:
    http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/query?status=closed&milestone=PostGIS+1.5.0