There is a new poll up on the QGIS website that asks: "Should QGIS join OSGEO?". Please take a minute and give us your opinion. If you aren't sure what OSGEO is all about, visit the OSGEO website and the wiki to learn more.

Thanks to the efforts of a number of folks (Tim Sutton, Stephan Holl, Radim Blazek) we have a Linux chroot for cross compiling the Windows version of QGIS. This provides a complete development environment for building QGIS and its dependencies using the MinGW compiler chain on Linux. Currently this is the only functional way to build QGIS on Windows with the GPL version of Qt. If you are interested in using the chroot, you can download it at: http://download.qgis.org/mingw_chroot.tar.bz2 (374Mb).

Since 0.7, we have slowly been working on improving the MapServer Export capability in QGIS. Matthew Perry has recently done some work on the exporter and it now sports a much wider range of capabilities. The exporter in 0.8 is Python based with a GUI front end. The script can also be run without the GUI if you provide a small driver script to feed it the needed arguments. Since the heavy lifting is done by the Python script, you can easily tweak it to meet your needs.

The tool is currently only available from the source code repository.

Things are rolling on towards the 0.8 release. Thanks to the development team, the number of outstanding bugs has been whittled down over the last week. Gavin has closed a lot of bugs over the last few weeks and Radim is now busy fixing the QGIS-GRASS issues. Stephan and Brendan have been working on the documentation and getting it up to speed for 0.8. And of course the rest of the team is busy working behind the scenes on bugs, documentation, platform, and packaging issues.

We will be releasing another preview once the remaining bugs are sorted out just to make sure we haven't missed something. If all goes well, the 0.8 release will follow shortly afterwards.

The sample data set available from the Download page on qgis.org has been updated. The data set now includes a raster (TIFF) for use with the original vector layers.

The downside is the file has increased from the original 1.3 Mb to 20 Mb.