Greetings all,
GeoServer is growing, as more developers are jumping on board and adding
some great improvements. The geotools team has done some solid work
redoing data io, with Sean Geoghegan and Jody Garnett making some
excellent changes to greatly improve GeoServer's internal handling of
data. Gabriel Roldan is working on basic arc-sde support, and reworked
GeoServer's request/response handling to be much less service specific,
allowing him to slot in some great WMS work. Jody is adding much better
locking support, and we're all integrating the new changes and ironing out
the new bugs.
These growths require a lot more communication, so the geoserver-devel
list is probably going to increase in traffic even more, focusing a lot
more on actual development issues. So I'm wondering if people on this
list might want a geoserver-users list, that would be focused more on end
users problems, such as geoserver bugs and configuration, split from the
devel list. The devel list would be the figuring out of bugs and
discussions about what needs to be done for future releases.
So if you are interested in such a list, email me. If you're fine with
the way things are, if everyone's just using filters anyways so the list
traffic doesn't affect them, then just stay on this list. If we get
enough interest in the users list I'll set it up.
In order to facilate communication, and to make the development process
more open, we've set up a JIRA task tracker. Thanks goes to James
Macgill, who set it up for us, Codehaus, who is hosting the instance, and
of course JIRA, who provides their excellent software free of cost to open
source projects. This will allow us to keep track of outstanding issues,
and allows you to easily submit bugs, new features, improvements, wishes,
and tasks.
The GeoServer tracker is at
http://jira.codehaus.org/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10311 JIRA is quite easy to
use, but you'll have to sign up for an account before you can do anything
with it. This will generate more list traffic, as all opened issues will
be sent to this list, so that all developers will be able to see new
tasks. After a task is submitted, you can click on it and choose to
'watch' the issue (you just click watch on the lefthand side), and you
will then be sent an email whenever the task is updated. So you can use
it directly for bugs, or you can continue to just email the list, but
we'll probably just reassign it there right away, so we can keep track of
it and remember to take care of it.
It still needs some configuration, as we need to figure out the components
and the roadmap and whatnot, but I'm hoping that we can make good use of
this excellent piece of software. The instance is grouped with GeoTools,
so it should allow us to easily reassign bugs that are actually GeoTools
problems, getting the fixes done there (though I haven't quite figured
this out yet.)
After we work out the kinks we will also strive to make it easier for
developers to get involved, making tasks that can be easily done by less
experienced developers, as we'd like GeoServer to be as much of a
community effort as possible. And to that end keep in mind that even if
you can not contribute code you are still a core part of this community,
helping to improve geoserver through feedback and bug reports. So please
make use of the tracker and the list to let us know about bugs, and more
importantly about the improvements you'd like to make geoserver more
powerful and easy to use. We'll try to make the tracker more easily
accessible from the front page as well, so it's easier to use.
best regards,
Chris