This page is our roadmp for future features and releases.

The new GPSD protocol

As of mid-September 2009, we are wrapping up a three-month siege of intense work on a top-to-bottom redesign of GPSD's wire protocol. While this brings many benefits (including, immediately, the ability to interpret and report on the output of marine AIS receivers) it poses some significant deployment challenges as well.

Over the next few releases we're going to be preoccupied with managing the transition to the new protocol.. Here is our tentative release schedule:

2.40 — Before end of October

New client API freezes. Wire protocol still considered unstable.

2.41 — Before end of 2009

Wire protocol freezes (no incompatible changes going forward from this point). Old protocol support will be removed from the daemon, but not from the library.

2.42 — Jan-Feb 2010

Cleanup release, if needed.

3.0 — Some time in the first quarter of 2010

Old protocol support will be removed from the library.

Changing hosting sites

We're presently (September 2009) hosted at berlios.de, but find that it has become extremely flaky of late (logins failing due to broken SSL certs is the most recent symptom). We plan to change sites before 2009 is over, probably to Googlecode where one of our developers has face-to-face access to the administrators.

Changing version-control systems

Sometime after we move house, we'll change version-control systems as well. Subversion has seved us well for five years, but we want to move to a 3G system to make off-net development easier. No decision has been matde yet, but the top candidates are Mercurial and git.