This is the MapServer 5.0 release plan adopted by the MapServer PSC on 2007-07-20.

See MS RFC 34 for more details on the MapServer Release Process.

New Features and Major Bug Fixes

New features in 5.0:

• MS RFC 19: Added Style and Label attribute binding
• MS RFC 21: Raster Color Correction via color lookup table
• MS RFC 27: Added label priority
• MS RFC 29: Added dynamic charting (pie and bar charts)
• MS RFC 31: New mechanism to load/set objects via URL using mapfile syntax
• MS RFC 32: Added support for map rendering using the AGG library for better output quality

Long time issues resolved in 5.0:

• MS RFC 17: Use dynamic allocation for symbols, layers, classes and styles (got rid of the static limit on the number of instances of each in a map)
• MS RFC 24: Improved memory management and garbage collection for MapScript
• MS RFC 26: Terminology cleanup (layer transparency renamed to opacity, scale becomes scaledenom, symbol style becomes symbol pattern)
• MS RFC 28: Enhanced the debug/logging mechanism to facilitate troubleshooting and tuning applications. Added support for multiple debug levels and more control on output location.

... and several fixes and enhancements not listed here.

Planned Dates

We will plan for 5 betas and 2 release candidates (RC) over a 7 weeks period after the code freeze (1 beta/RC per week each Wednesday). This will lead us to a final release around September 12th:

• Feature freeze - July 23, 2007
• 5.0.0-beta1 - Wed. July 25, 2007
  
• 5.0.0-beta2 - Wed Aug. 1, 2007
  
• 5.0.0-beta3 - Wed Aug. 8, 2007
• 5.0.0-beta4 - Wed Aug. 15, 2007
• 5.0.0-beta5 - Wed Aug. 22, 2007
• 5.0.0-beta6 - Wed Aug. 29, 2007
• 5.0.0-rc1 - Wed Sept. 5, 2007
  
• 5.0.0-rc2 - Mon Sept. 10, 2007
• 5.0.0 (final) - Mon Sept. 17, 2007

Release Manager (see MS RFC 34)

Daniel Morissette

SVN Tags/Branches?

Note that starting with this release the source code is now managed in Subversion (SVN) instead of CVS and we have migrated from bugzilla to Trac for bug tracking.

• The main trunk SVN is currently the 4.99 development version that we plan to release as 5.0
• The stable SVN branch for this release will be called "branch-5-0" (not created yet).
• Current proposed date for creating "branch-5-0" is the date of the 5.0.0 release (around Sept 12, 2007)
• If post-5.0 developments require earlier branching then please bring up your request for branching on the -dev list.
• The betas will be tagged in SVN as "rel-5-0-0-beta1", "rel-5-0-0-beta2", ... and the releases as "rel-5-0-0", "rel-5-0-1", etc...

Trac Conventions

In order to facilitate querying the Trac database for tickets that still need to be addressed for this release, we try to stick to the following conventions:

• Tickets to be addressed for this release must have their target milestone set to "5.0 release"
• Bugs/Enhancements? that can't make it in this release but that we may want to address at a later time should be marked with the "FUTURE" target milestone with a comment explaining that the bug is postponed and if possible a quick analysis
• The target milestone on a ticket should be set by the developers (bug owners) and not by the users (reporters).

Other good practices when dealing with tickets:

• Please file tickets for any non-trivial bugfix or change to the software. This is so that we keep a trace for future reference of all bugfixes and changes that were made (why and how).
• Please mark bugs ASSIGNED as soon as you start working on them
• Please when marking a bug fixed include a comment describing the fix, the version of the software in which it was done, the SVN changeset number (e.g. r1234) and any other relevant information. This will just make our lives easier in a few months/years when questions come up about this issue.
• When committing to SVN, please include the bug number in your CVS change log comment e.g. (#1234).
• Keep documentation in mind when fixing/changing things: if you cannot update the documentation yourself then please create a documentation bug describing the new feature/change and which document(s) should be updated.

The following query returns all currently open bugs that are tagged with the "5.0 release" target milestone:

http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=5.0+release

QA

Testing MapServer

Open Tasks

None.