mkgmap

A gentoo package for mkgmap

2008-11-08T21:20:00Z

I've had word from Hanno Böck that there is a gentoo package for mkgmap. It's in the official gentoo tree, so it's just a matter of doing the following:

 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge mkgmap

The link to the package page for mkgmap.

There are a number of other useful map related packages such as JOSM and mapnik that are used by OSM on the geosciences page too.

Subversion upgrade

2008-08-18T21:34:00Z

The subversion repository for mkgmap has been upgraded to 1.5 and at the same time it was moved to a different machine. You don't have to do anything and everything should look the same as it was, but I'm letting you all know just in case I've forgotten to set something up properly.

If you see that the latest version is 665 or above then you are seeing the new server.

mkgmap now in Debian

2008-08-02T15:03:00Z

There is now a Debian package for mkgmap, in "sid".

Thanks to Andreas Putzo who made and uploaded the package and to the debian GIS team. Andreas also wrote the mkgmap man page which has been incorporated into the main mkgmap code base.

Nightly builds are currently disabled

2008-07-13T21:24:00Z

I stopped the nightly build that produces the mkgmap snapshots for a while as there are a number of changes being made that are large and not well tested. It has always been the case that the nightly snapshots are almost always perfectly usable and quickly fixed if not. Usually they are better than the version that is marked as "stable". So they are disabled until this is likely to be true again after branches are merged back to the main trunk.

Of course feel free to build from subversion if you want to experiment with the latest and greatest.

Moving to java 1.6

2008-07-12T18:51:00Z

Just a quick note to say that in the not too distant future, mkgmap will require version 1.6 of java to run.

Really the only reason why this is not the case at the moment is so that it can run with gcj. However it just doesn't really work with gcj anyway as it either runs very slowly or goes into a never ending loop. If that were the only Free Software java then I would try to make it work, but Sun's version of Java is now available under the GPL licence and it works so much better for this application. So openJDK (also known as Iced Tea) is the only reliable way of running mkgmap and as this is 1.6 there is really nothing left preventing a switch to version 1.6.

Having said all that, nothing will change until there is something added that actually requires 1.6, this is just advanced notice.