Prebuilt v3 binaries "soon"
Buddy Mash
It’s good to see that Mapnik is still being actively maintained with this week’s 3.0.20 release. That said, I’m still frustrated to see that v3 still doesn’t have Windows binaries available. Version 3 has been out for almost 3 years now and annoyingly, still, the mapnik.org download page still says “We plan on providing prebuilt binaries soon for Mapnik 3.0.20”. It’s said that for every version 3 release so far! Three years of “soon”. Could the author of this page just be honest and say something like “Sorry, no plans, resources or volunteers available for prebuilt binaries. Get in touch if you want to help”.
I’m not a programmer, but a couple of years ago I tried to build Mapnik from source with some help from a colleague who is an experienced developer. It was agonizing and my colleague noted how this project seems no longer seems to be for users (rather than developers) or those on Windows. I got a reprimand from my boss for spending two weeks “dicking around” (her words) and then went back to ArcGIS to complete the required map visualizations.
My firm is a strong Esri shop and there are only a small handful of us who are open source advocates. We’re making good progress with using QGIS for some projects, but my experience with Mapnik has actually been harmful to the reputation of open source in my department.
I still have the latest published version of Mapnik for Windows on my PC… that’s v2.2.0 dated June 2013 – almost 5 years old. I have a new PC coming next week and have to decide what software to carry over. I just can’t justify keeping crusty Mapnik v2. If prebuilt binaries for Windows for v3 (with Python bindings so that I can run generate_tiles.py) become available, I’d welcome it back into my GIS toolkit. If not, farewell Mapnik… Esri wins. ☹
I’m grateful to the contributors to Mapnik but would once again highlight that there are probably a lot of semi-technical users, like me, who can only work on Windows, which the project has turned its back on. We’ve waited patiently for the great features in v3 but “soon” never came.
BR,
/Bud
Jukka Rahkonen
Have you seen https://github.com/mapnik/node-mapnik/issues/848?
-Jukka Rahkonen-
Buddy Mash kirjoitti 2018-04-13 12:07:
> It’s good to see that Mapnik is still being actively maintained with
> this week’s 3.0.20 release. That said, I’m still frustrated to see
> that v3 still doesn’t have Windows binaries available. Version 3 has
> been out for almost 3 years now and annoyingly, still, the mapnik.org
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Buddy Mash
Thanks, Jukka. I had not seen that, but isn’t node-mapnik the project to add node.js bindings to Mapnik? Does the loss of support for Windows in node-mapnik automatically mean the underlying Mapnik project too?
BR/
Bud
an email to mapnik+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Blake Thompson
We did fully stop supporting pre-built mapnik windows binaries recently. However, we did produce some v3 binaries along the way, we never updated the site, but I believe this is the last version of windows we prebuilt. http://mapnik.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/dev/mapnik-win-sdk-v3.0.15-x86-14.0.7z
However, as part of v3 -- we removed python bindings from mapnik and they now live in python-mapnik. https://github.com/mapnik/python-mapnik
The code for mapnik should still compile for Windows, but we simply do not pre-build everything anymore. You should still be able to build such files locally on your machine -- however, I know this will be some work.
If you want out of the box tile generation software, you likely need to look at other libraries such as QGIS or GDAL to help here.
Thanks,
Blake Thompson
