Hi List,
in the last days some "Medicine Man" (probably after carefully reading the
tea leaves in the bottom of the cup) concluded that the SpatiaLite project
was becoming moribund.
Happily for us all, it was a fake new: SpatiaLite never was in a better
physical shape than today.
The long lasting and tiresome development work started few years ago
is now almost completed, and today we are finally ready to begin the last
steps toward the final release of all the individual components of the
NEXT GENERATION SpatiaLite's growing family.
This final phase will presumably end in October; community collaboration
for testing the software and checking the documentation will certainly be
of paramount relevance.
This time we are not simply going to release a single library or software
application; we are going instead to release a rather complex family of
individual components strictly related the one to the other, and this surely
requires some extraordinary effort.
Let's see the general principles that will regulate this final phase:
1. each individual component will follow its own autonomous way toward
its final STABLE release.
2 the whole process will complete only when all the components of the
NEXT GENERATION family will reach their final STABLE release.
3. each single component will independently enter the Release Candidate
status when all design functionalities will be definitively implemented
and will work in a reasonably stable and safe way.
any further development activity will be frozen for all components
in the Release Candidate status, except for fixing critical bugs
and nursing the build scripts.
once that all the above staging steps will terminate, then the
component will be duly released in its final STABLE form.
4. all the other components not yet ready for becoming Release Candidates
will still continue to be classified as BETA.
a component in BETA status is still subject to active development
(e.g. some further functionality could be added, and the API/ABI
could eventually change if considered convenient).
each subsequent BETA step will be sequentially numbered for clarity,
but its important to understand well that a BETA release does not
necessarily corresponds to any peculiar milestone.
a BETA step simply corresponds to a snapshot of the current Fossil
repository, and is uniquely intended to allow building the
whole NEXT GENERATION family in a self-consistent fashion.
Components of the NEXT GENERATION family
----------------------------------------
1) libspatialite-5.0.0
2) librasterlite2-1.1.0
3) virtualpg-2.0.0
4) spatialite_gui-2.1.0 (corresponding to the integration of
all the three others).
General release plan for Testing (unstable) versions
----------------------------------------------------
a) each time that an individual component will be ready for
entering the Release Candidate status (or for transitioning
from the RC to its finale STABLE status) all the components
of the NEXT GENERATION family will be released as well (may
well be still in a BETA status), so to ensure a correct
synchronization and overall consistency.
b) each Testing release will always include both the source
tarballs and the pre-built executable binaries for Windows
platforms.
c) the Testing cycle will stop when the last individual
component will finally reach its STABLE release.
A more specific announcement about the first BETA step
made available will follow in the next hours.
bye Sandro