Site Updated

Site update is complete. And I finally reorganized the menu so it’s a little less confusing.

Coming soon: wiki pages. I found a lightweight wiki a while back, and implemented it at my workplace intranet. Not quite fully integrated with Geeklog yet, but maybe someday… I’ll then move the software build instruction pages (and update them – oooohhh) and the rest to the wiki. I’ll keep Geeklog for the blog/news side of operations.

I’m pondering the idea of allowing user registration, mainly to let others help in the porting docs. But it’ll probably be by invitation only, or by request if someone thinks they can help.

Another GDAL fix

Working across 2 computers and 2 system versions can be trouble. Another GDAL 1.4.3 fix for a minor crossover with Leopard builds. For real this time.

Pre-Leopard Update

Before I get to Leopard updates, here is GDAL 1.4.3. In addition to the new version, it fixes a crashing problem with Qgis 0.9 when opening GRASS data.

Some Leopard compatibility notes for the current builds:

  • the frameworks seem to work
  • Postgres has some install problems – it succeeds, but the postgres user can’t be created, so it won’t run.
  • GRASS works, if you make sure that DISPLAY is not set in your .bash_profile.
  • Qgis 0.9 runs (with the updated GDAL framework).
  • I haven’t tested or heard any news about MapServer or PHP. I suspect the PHP enabler may have problems, if httpd.conf has changed drastically.

Leopard & Python

A note about Python on Leopard. Leopard includes Python 2.5, so there is no need to install it. The current python extension installers (GDAL, MapServer) don’t know this, and so will not install. It’s probably best to not install the current MacPython and wait for the extension packages to get updated for Leopard’s Python.

Big Batch of Updates

PostgreSQL updated to 8.2.5. I also added the “fuzzymatch” extra (I started playing around with the TIGER geocoder extra in PostGIS).

New pgRouting extension for Postgres (I had this ready and uploaded, but for some reason forgot to add the link). It replaces the old pgDijkstra extension.

UnixImageIO framework updated: new libtiff 4.0 alpha with BigTIFF support. This is a framework version change (A -> B), so old software won’t automatically support BigTIFF until it is rebuilt with the new framework. The previous version binary is included so old software isn’t broken. PNG lib also updated to 1.2.20.

Other framework updates: PDFlib now 7.0.2, Xerces now 2.8.0. Xerces is also a framework version change, and the previous version binary is included.

64bits & Leopard Prep

I’m starting think about Leopard. Not much I can do with the builds yet – I only have the free developer membership, so I can’t get any Leopard prerelease developer software. Working on ideas and and 64bit stuff I can do in Tiger.

This is my rough plan.

  • Drop Panther compatibility (very probable) – between patches, library incompatibilities, and extra features in Tiger, building for Panther compatibility is a hassle. Sure, Leopard/Tiger compatibility may have similar issues, but the fewer the better.
  • Revert to system libraries where possible – part of the Panther compatibility required building some libraries that were available in the system myself. These include curl, bzip2, readline and sqlite3. Since I do Sqlite as a framework, I will probably keep doing that.
  • 64 bit builds.

I did some initial work on 64bit builds in Tiger. Tiger supports 64bit compilation (a separate thing from 64bit file sizes, which is supported back to at least Panther). BUT, only in the system library. This means mainly number-crunching stuff that runs from the command line – no networking, no GUI, no devices…

I was able to build 64bit Tiger for UnixImageIO (except the Xpm library which needs a 64bit X11 library), GEOS, PROJ and FreeType.

Xerces needs Carbon frameworks for some Mac services (file IO and char encoding features), instead of using similar unix-level services. That eliminates a 64bit Tiger GDAL right there. Python will definitely need Leopard, with all the stuff it covers (especially wxPyhon), so not even GDAL python tools will be possible, if the minor Xerces issue is ignored.

Of course, all the applications (GRASS, Qgis, …) and server apps (Postgres, MapServer) will not be possible 64bit on Tiger.

This leaves a split build for the future. Looks like I will do Tiger-only 32bit universal builds and Leopard-only 64bit builds. It’s likely that the 32bit Tiger builds will also work on Leopard, to allow compatibility for old software on Leopard that doesn’t get rebuilt for 64bit Leopard (at all, or in a timely fasion), so I could make the installers quad-arch universal, and just strip out the 64bit parts when installed on Tiger.

MapServer 5.0.0

MapServer 5.0.0 released! Cheers to the developers!

I didn’t hear of any problems with the framework build, so I’m leaving out the traditional static build for now.

After FOSS4G I will be doing a long-overdue upgrade to our server (at my job) – Panther to Tiger – and will update other old stuff like PHP and MapServer. I hope to work on some old & new MapServer applications later in the year, and do some real-world testing. I’m looking forward to the new AGG rendering.