Phwew! Here you go. First round of Leopard updates. Unless noted below, everything in this update is quad-architecture for Tiger & Leopard – that is, 32bit & 64bit, PPC & Intel. Most use a single binary for all, but PHP had to be separate binaries between Tiger and Leopard because the Apache web server is completely different. They should work with the old applications, GRASS, Qgis, MapServer, so updating the frameworks shouldn’t break those on Tiger. With such a big change, there are bound to be problems, so be sure to let me know.
Installers – Since I dropped support for Panther, I can now take advantage of “distribution packages”. This makes it easier to combine multiple units into a single installer, and make them detect dependencies per unit, such as the GDAL framework and the optional GDAL Python tools.
Frameworks – The UnixImageIO, GDAL, PROJ, GEOS, SQLite3, FFTW3 and FreeType frameworks have been updated. I am dropping the GD framework, and instead building it into PHP and MapServer directly, since it’s so small and of limited use otherwise. The PDFlib framework is a bit of a beast, and I’d really like to have something more open (libharu looks promising, though development is stalled), so I’ve been ignoring it. I’ll get to it later. The GraphicMagic framework may come later too.
Xerces is a problem. With Leopard, Apple deprecated Carbon. Fine, it’s an old transistion API anyways. BUT, for some reason they decided to NOT update it for 64bit processors. While the rest of the system is 32 & 64 bits, Carbon is not (which is probably the system still runs in 32bit mode, even on 64bit processors). Xerces uses Carbon for file handling. Therefore, no 64bit Xerces until it’s updated. That means no GML format in GDAL for now. When Xerces is updated, I’ll probably drop it as a framework and build it into GDAL.
Python – The Python libraries and most extensions are 64bits in Leopard. The Python executable is not, probably because of Carbon. The GDAL python tools are built 64bits, but only run in 32bit mode because of python. You must get or build a 64bit python executable yourself to use the GDAL Python tools in 64bit mode. I can’t help with that.
Postgres & PostGIS – Fully 64bit-enabled. Except that I left out the PL/Python and PL/Perl languages (Perl is also a 32bit-only executable in Leopard). I’m having trouble with the pgrouting extension in 64bits, so it’s not ready yet.
PHP5 – Leopard includes PHP5 as Apache DSO, so only PHP5 CGI is included. PHP5 CGI is also included for Tiger, but I will add PHP5 DSO for Tiger later. Or wait to see if there is interest, since MapServer stability is still an unknown on PHP DSO. There is always Liyanage’s PHP5 DSO.
PHP4 will not be updated. It will officially be EOL’d at the end of the year.
Next up: MapServer – completely new for Leopard’s Apache 2.2. Sometime later: Qgis – no 64bit possible yet; GRASS – 64bit goodness, mostly; filling in missing pieces.