[FGS] FGS future direction

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi everyone,

The FGS project has been a bit quiet lately. We're still using it 
internally, but not much is happening on the open source/public front. 
This is mostly because Guillaume is no longer working on it full time 
(he has another full time job), so the project is kind of orphan right 
now. I think FGS serves a very useful purpose (at least it does for us 
and our clients), and I think we should give it a little boost to take 
it to the next level.

First of all I would like to find out who, outside of Mapgears and DM 
Solutions uses FGS actively or has an interest in it, and how it is 
being used.

There is some work going on right now to build a FGS package for the 
Open Source MapGuide (http://mapguide.osgeo.org/) but MapGuide is huge 
and there are issues with MapGuide that may require changes to FGS. I'd 
like to ensure that whatever is done for MapGuide will remain compatible 
with other packages and be viable for the long run.

To address the above, I'd like to propose the following draft roadmap 
for FGS:

1- Setup a FGS Project Steering Committee (PSC) that would be in charge 
of leading the future of FGS

2- Plan for a new release (0.3) that would address some of the issues 
with 0.2.

3- Setup a VM-based build environment that can be shared by all 
developers to compile/distribute compatible FGS packages. This should 
address the problems with the current 0.2 packages on the download site 
which were compiled on a fairly recent Debian system and are not as 
portable as the 0.1 packages which were built on an older system and 
really worked virtually anywhere. If we all use the same VM based on the 
same architecture as what was used by 0.1 then all developers could 
compile packages that work(!), and that are compatible with each other.

4- Plan for a 1.0 release (possibly just take 0.3 and call it 1.0)

Please share your thoughts...

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/