[ANNOUNCE] libchamplain 0.7.0

[Jiří Techet <techet gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

libchamplain 0.7.0 has been released. This is the first release of the
0.7 cycle with some new features:

* Separation of map sources and renderers - map sources read data from somewhere
  (file, network, ...), renderers generate tiles based on the data (Jiří Techet)
* Add null tile source (a dummy data source not reading any data) and error
  tile renderer (renderer always generating error tile). Remove error tile
  source (Jiří Techet)
* Get rid of non-persistent file tile cache and introduce memory cache -
  temporary cache stored in memory only (Jiří Techet)
* Whitespace cleanups - use uncrustify beautifier for this task and correct
  problems manually (Jiří Techet)
* Minor fixes and cleanups (Jiří Techet)

The tarball is available here:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libchamplain/0.7/libchamplain-0.7.0.tar.gz

Those who read the libchamplain mailing list in the past will realize
that the release contains just one half of the new features I wanted
for 0.8 (originally I planned to introduce a new hierarchy of markers
and change the way how they are notified about position changes).
Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to implement all this for this
release. First, because of the late release of 0.6 there was very
little time left for the implementation, second, summer, the enemy of
coding, arrived with all its non-coding real life temptations so I did
less work than I'd wish.

Instead of postponing the release again I prefer to make the release
on time and follow the gnome release schedule. According to the
schedule yesterday was the date of API freeze and I'd like to follow
this too. So the libchamplain's API is frozen now for the 0.8 release.
This means that bindings maintainers can start working on updating
language bindings. (The API freeze is not completely strict - if there
are some bugs that can only be fixed by updating the API, I will do
that, but in such a case I'll write an explicit notification about it
on this mailing list). One pleasant change for the bindings
maintainers is that memphis bindings won't be necessary in order to
create bindings for libchamplain. All the necessary types have been
declared in libchamplain itself (ChamplainMemphisRuleAttr,
ChamplainMemphisRuleType, ChamplainMemphisRule). Also the
memphis-related code is now reduced to just two files -
champlain-memphis-renderer.[ch].

The fact that API is frozen doesn't mean there will be no more new
features in 0.8. Some of the feature suggestions in our bug tracker
can be addressed without API changes. Also I'd like to do some
preparations and cleanups for the following release cycle.

Many of the changes I have made are quite fresh and they haven't been
tested properly. However, everything seems to work and there shouldn't
be any major issues with the code. One known problem is that
ChamplainFileCache doesn't use the assigned renderer for rendering its
tiles yet, but this is going to be fixed in the next release. Also
right now the documentation of the new code is basically missing -
this is something I want to address in the next release too.

Finally I would like to propose libchamplain 0.8 to be used in the
following gnome release so I don't have to maintain the old 0.4.x
release any more. Also there are some bugs in the bug tracker (e.g.
problems with empathy) that I want to get fixed before the final
release.

Cheers,

Jiri