[maplab-users] Next MapLab relase suggestion

[Daniel Morissette]

Henry Kingman wrote:
> 
> It's just "last mile neglect," very famous in all software
> development projects. It underscores the fundamental and
> permanent disconnect between Programer and System
> Administrator. Which are you?
> 

We are both actually... and that might be part of the problem.  Being
experienced administrators we know lots of ways to avoid problems
and make things work for our own needs, and too often we tend to
forget that the software is sometimes way too complex to install for the
average user.


> Starting with Mapscript not being able to use PHP regex!
> 

This one is a much more complicated story than just a last mile
neglect... the issue is that both MapScript (MapServer) and PHP are very
complex applications built on top of many other libraries.  Both
MapServer and PHP have preferences for one version of a library or
another... and in order to get a properly working build you need to get
PHP, MapServer, and all supporting packages to all share the same
version of every library that they use... and this can sometimes become
a real nightmare.  (The main libs that are shared by most installs and
with which you have to be careful are: regex, GD, freetype, libpng,
libz, libjpeg)

Building MapServer (the CGI) standalone is easy, building PHP standalone
is easy, works out of the box in both cases... it's getting the two to
work together (with all their support libs) that's the challenge.  It's
not impossible, it just needs some work, and as I mentioned above we are
both developers and system administrators who know all the tricks to get
things working so it works well for us since we know how to configure
things to avoid problems. We also try to share our knowledge as much as
possible but at the end the process remains complex.


Of course all this is no excuse for the complexity of an installation,
but I just wanted to explain why things were the way they are.

Oh and BTW I agree with most of the other comments that came up in this
thread.

Daniel
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 Daniel Morissette               morissette@dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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