We were forced to release a 1.3.5 PostGIS upgrade as a result of a bug we accidentally introduced in 1.3.4 during our code cleanup. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused people. This bug affects the use of MULTILINESTRINGS and rears its ugly head by giving errors such as invalid circular line string when calling ST_Multi or another odd error when doing a Force collection on a MULTILINESTRING. This hits mapserver users using these geometry types the hardest.
More details of the issue can be gleaned from Paul Ramsey's blog. Warning: PostGIS 1.3.4 + Mapserver
A while back Kevin Neufeld came up with an efficient template for documenting each PostGIS function. This is the template we are using to rewrite the PostGIS 1.4 function reference section. The PostGIS 1.4 function reference section is almost complete. This allowed us to create special indexes sections and generate database level comments on functions with an XSL Transform.
This documentation enhancement helped at least partly solve another problem all thru the magic of XSLT. Given how much code we are refactoring and so, forth, how can we possibly test all 150 someodd spatial functions against all geometry types we support and continue to do so as our geometry types expand and functions expand?
It turned out not to be too hard to write an xsl transform script that takes our documentation as input and spits out what I shall call a torture script that for each function defined in our documentation exercises it for each geometry type we support. So the output is an approximate 1 MB file of sql battery of tests. The added benefits is that as we add new functions to our documentation, they are automatically tested and the script also flags when documented functions are no longer in use or errors in the documentation. So its a very interesting feedback loop.
It is still a work in progress, but was unfortunately too late in coming to test 1.3.4. Testing against 1.3.5 we uncovered some crashers and minor defects that have existed in this and prior versions which we plan to attend to in 1.3.6 and 1.4. We also uncovered another small thing we sort of broke with Curved types, but was of questionable logic to begin with that we temporarily patched in 1.3.5 but will revisit in later versions. Hopefully this added step to our testing process will save us from similar mistakes in the future.