As David Page already noted, Leo and I are taking over responsibility of building PostGIS windows one-click installers/stack builder from Mark Cave-Ayland. The PostGIS 1.4 windows packaging was a little late in coming this time since it
was our first and also some things changed in the PostGIS packaging for 1.4. Even so we made some mistakes such as statically compiling libproj in with the postgis-1.4.dll and forgetting some new images in the packaged html help, which we will fix in 1.4.1 release.
Mark will still be providing a supporting role and helping out when we screw up or helping us if we run into compile issues as we go along so he's not going away; he will be a great safety net.
When Mark started his role a long time ago, he was as many would like to say "Very entrenched in the dark side,"
and over the years, he has seen the light. As a result, these moments of catching issues in the PostGIS release
cycle that effect windows users such as troubleshooting the memory bug in the loader files that affected Windows Vista users and testing on various Windows OS, has fallen on us, because well we have access
to all windows os.
It also became painful for Mark
to walk in the shadow of darkness once he had seen the light. Luckily we are still windows addicts so this having to constantly test on Windows and building for
Windows is something we would naturally do anyway and yes as shocking as it sounds we do run some production PostgreSQL apps on windows
and it works pretty well, thank you very much. We don't expect this to change any time soon.
As part of this change, we hope to provide more interim windows builds of PostGIS so windows users can experiment with future releases before they come
out. Yes compiling on windows is a tad bit more difficult than on Linux. These PostGIS windows experimental builds can be found http://postgis.net/windows_downloads
Main changes in PostGIS
- The PostGIS steering committee has agreed to be good and not be adding new functions
between micro releases of PostGIS as we have done in the past and as we've been smacked around for. As part of that change,
from PostGIS 1.4 moving forward each micro version will overwrite the previous micro version in the MS Windows registry. E.g. 1.4.1 will overwrite 1.4.0 so no need to uninstall the old
and reinstall to get rid of registry junk. Just install on top of your existing 1.4.
- As of PostGIS 1.4 it is possible to run different versions of PostGIS in different databases on teh same PostgreSQL server install since the .so/.dll from minor to minor have unique names (naming is postgis-1.4.so (postgis-1.4.dll), postgis-1.5.so etc). This is mostly useful
for testing and comparing different versions of PostGIS before you officially upgrade and if you have several different spatial apps using different databases, you don't risk breaking them all at once.
- PostGIS is now an official incubation project of OSGEO. Things are still being drafted. But I guess that means our
PostGIS defacto steering committee composed of Kevin, Paul, Mark, and myself
is now more or less official.
On the topic of Writing
We just submitted first revision of chapter 6 of our upcoming book PostGIS in Action and are working on our second
revision of that chapter. The second revision will most likely be split into 2 chapters because its too long for a single chapter. It will cover loading/exporting various format types of spatial
data and everything you never wanted to know about spatial reference systems.
We also submitted the second revision of the upcoming RefCardz DZone Essential PostgreSQL. Not sure when that will be
released since we are already a bit behind schedule. I imagine we will have a couple more iterations of that before its done. It is really hard to cram into
six pages the most important things that every PostgreSQL user should know and all the exciting stuff in PostgreSQL without feeling like you are leaving something critical out.
I'm always amazed how people manage to write books by themselves. If you think for each chapter you go thru 4-5 revisions and each subsequent revision is about 20-50% of the previous, that's a lot. Leo and I are writing together and its still a struggle though its been fun. I guess
writing together has its own challenges because you are constantly cutting each others stuff out and arguing over what is important and what is not. We have managed to not have too many heated debates that would spoil dinner. This is good since Leo does the cooking because he thinks I'm too absent-minded
to be capable of complex tasks like cooking.
PostGIS in Action
About the Authors
Consulting
