[FGS] Preliminary mapserver package

[Frank Warmerdam]

Guillaume Dallaire wrote:
> I built a mapserver package (v4.2.1). You can test it :
> 
> http://maxine.harmeny.com/~gdallaire/
> 
> If your linux installation doesn't have a GD library >= v2.0.12
> installed, you must also install the gd package.

Guillaume,

I took a quick look at this.  A few comments:

  o To stage things so that folks can get to the package, I would
    encourage you to place it under /home/fgs/fgs-pkgs instead of under
    your own come directory.

  o I think that GD should be just included in the mapserver package.  A
    general rule of thumb with FGS is that we should try to provide every
    dependency we can.  GD is only 1.6MB so I would strongly suggest just
    making it part of the mapserver package.   I have taken the liberty of
    copying your pkg-fgs/gd and pkg-fgs/mapserver directories to
    /home/fgs/fgs-pkgs/mapserver in a merged form.

  o An ldd on shp2img shows a few other library dependencies that you are
    depending on being provided by the local system.
     - freetype.so.6
     - libpng12.so (there is another libpng  from FGS as well)

  o I was surprised not to see anything about libcurl.  Is it statically
    linked in?

  o It seems no attempt was made to use a mapserver shared library.  There
    are ways of forcing mapserver to build all the binaries using libmap
    as a shared library.  I would strongly encourage this as currently the
    binaries are unecessarily duplicate about 500K of stuff in each one.
    This is making the mapserver package roughly 4MB larger than needed.

  o Please update the Wiki with information about your package in a manner
    similar to the other packages.

  o I think that at least Python mapscript should be built for MapServer
    in a form compatible with the Python that Tyler has prepared for FGS.

  o I would like to see PostGIS support included.  The postgres client
    library is already in the FGS base.

> To finish, you need to run fgsinstall-mapserver.sh. This script adds
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH in apache conf and installs mapserv cgi in the
> /var/www/cgi-bin directory.
> 
> This is a first draft. There is perhaps a better way to handle the
> cgi-bin installation ?

Hmm, I am a little nervous about us trying to update an external Apache
configuration.  Lots of things can go wrong with this.

Tyler had talked about us actually distributing a web server as part of
the FGS suite - likely a simple one written in Python rather than trying
to integrate with whatever web server might be installed on the target
system (if any).  My suggestion would be that we take two avenues.

1) pursue having a web server distributed with FGS and ensure that we can
    work under it smoothly.

2) Ensure that the all our cgi-bin's are dumped into one place (as you have
    done) and that it is documented how to manually update a web server to
    us our stuff.

You have made an excellent start on a MapServer package.   I would add that
MapServer is one of the most complicated packages because of the number of
dependencies and because it is our first web service.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent