Category: Software

Mainly a change in the internals of GDAL – I decided to hide the included support libraries. Letting others link to the support libraries is a bit fragile, since they’re not guaranteed to stay there, or in the same form, and others who build their own GDAL framework (once it’s an option in the GDAL source) may not include them. This includes removing the Libraries symlink at the top level, unix/lib only has libgdal in it, and headers are only present for GDAL itself.

GDAL headers are OK as ‘proper’ framework headers. It turns out no changes were needed. GDAL readme updated, no other changes to the framework.

Still getting by on the old PowerBook, sigh.

Just in time for FOSS4G! (sorry, I can’t make it) New MapServer 4.10 beta 3. Weekly GRASS 6.3 update from CVS, plus a small fix for a GUI issue.

I did some fine-tuning on the frameworks. This affects Xcode developers only. I have gone thru the frameworks to check that they work as proper frameworks with their headers – that is, frameworks don’t need -I includes flags to the compiler, and their headers can be included with <frameworkname/header.h>, such as #include <PROJ/proj_api.h> and CPP will find the header in /Library/Frameworks/PROJ.framework/Headers.

Many didn’t need any changes. A few needed some simple adjustments for this to work – FreeType, GEOS, Xerces and UnixImageIO. GDAL is the only one that needs more work, and does not have proper headers yet. The readmes of all frameworks have been updated to reflect this information, but only the 4 listed above had any changes made to the framework itself.

It’s sure easy to get spoiled. PowerBook – 1/5 the processing power = 5X build times. And I keep trying to scroll with the trackpad ^_^

A few updates today: GRASS 6.2b2 and the latest GRASS 6.3 CVS, and MapServer 4.10b2 (I was in the middle of the MS build when the RSS kicked in on the MacBook). Hopefully suddenly switching back to PPC won’t mess up the builds.

There is a new addition to the GRASS builds – a template for building addon modules without needing the full GRASS source. Similar to the GEM system, but it doesn’t need a lot of extra setup for the module source, and it lets you install the module where you want (and not in the app package, which is a Bad Thing for OS X apps). With this I enabled an Application Support folder in both the global Library and the user Library for installing addon modules. And the GRASS.app build source has also been updated to reflect this.

It’s kinda rough right now, and doesn’t support adding the modules to the GUI menus or a module registry (which require editing files in the app package, another Bad Thing). Changes in the GUI code are needed to handle an external menu config. Help files are not integrated in the main GRASS help pages.

I found a fix for the FreeType problem. It was an endian problem for Intel Macs and Mac suitcase fonts.

I added the R GDAL package to the GDAL framework download. And there are now instructions for enabling R integration with GRASS.

GRASS (apps and the build script) fixed so r.out.gdal works.

====== MapServer 4.10 beta 1 ======

MacBook all better. ^_^

MapServer 4.10 beta 1 is available for testing. From the announcement email:

MapServer 4.10 introduces the following new features (and much more):

• MS RFC 9: Item tag for query templates
• MS RFC 11: Support for Curved Labels
• MS RFC 13: SOS support
• MS RFC 14: Relative Coordinates for INLINE features
• MS RFC 16: MapScript WxS Services
• MS RFC 18: Encryption of passwords in mapfilesCurved Labels
• Web Map Context (WMC) 1.1 support
• SLD support in Web Map Context
• Mapfile includes
• GEOS rewrite to use C API and new methods exposed
• GEOS methods ported to PHP MapScript (only in SWIG MapScript before)

…

It appears there is a problem with FreeType and Mac fonts. By Mac fonts, I mean any that are packaged as Mac suitcases (TrueType and PostScript) or the new OS X dfont. In particular it seems to affect multi-font packages, so could affect OTF fonts if there is more than one font in the OTF file. The problem – segfault (crash).

I never noticed before because I only ever use flat, single-font fonts, like OTF and Windows/Unix style TT and PS fonts. And none of the tools I use have any mechanism for specifying the style or face anyways – it’s expected that the style is a part of the font file name chosen, ie Helvetica-Bold.otf. But, FreeType is supposed to default to the first face in a package, whatever that may be, yet it doesn’t work.

Until I can figure it out, you should use only flat, single-font fonts with GD, ImageMagick, MapServer, GRASS and QGIS. OTF fonts are mostly OK, that is when there is only one face in the file. Unix-style PostScript fonts have a .pfb or .pfa extension. Unix-style TrueType fonts have a .ttf extension. You can use a font conversion utility, such as FontLab’s TransType, to convert fonts to Windows/Unix format.

Interestingly, the FreeType that Apple includes with X11 does not have suitcase fonts enabled, but does have dfonts enabled. I wonder if they had problems also? I recall having an issue like this before, but I couldn’t find anything in my archives…

Sorry for the inconvenience.