Merkaartor 0.16.0 was uploaded to Debian/unstable several days ago and should be available on all architectures now.

As usual please help testing the new version - upstream and me will try to fix all bugs as fast as possible. Below follows the long list of new features, for the full list of changes see the CHANGELOG.

• Ramer-Douglas-Peucker simplification of ways (in Roads menu)
• support for JOSM remote protocol on port 8111
• support for "standard" (as in http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Tile_Map_Service_Specification) TMS
• Preliminary support for OpenStreetBugs (Refs #983)
• POC of a Gosmore map adapter
• Allow to delete features from the context menu of the Features dock
• Accept mlon/mlat URLs as emitted by mkgmap logging
• Walking Papers backgound plugin + load WP scans as geotagged images
• Import from OSC (osmChange format)
• Feature-Force Delete action (deletes the feature without entry in the undo nor upload list)
• Export to OSC (osmChange format)
• CSV POI import
• OSGB36 to the default list of projections
• Add SHP feature attributes as not uploadable OSM Feature tags
• Allow to save geotagged images
• show geotagged photos on the map (disable via 'view-Show Photos on map')
• Templates xsd (by Jonathan Bennett) (closes #2809; closes #2707)
• allow to re-order relation members (closes #2759)
• add a projection editor
• allow google maps links in goto and download dialogs
• Allow to tile (and cache) arbitrary WMS'es (only EPSG:4326 and google projection supported)
• Export to OSC (osmChange format)
• CSV POI import
• OSGB36 to the default list of projections
• Add SHP feature attributes as not uploadable OSM Feature tags
• Allow to save geotagged images
• show geotagged photos on the map (disable via 'view-Show Photos on map')
• Templates xsd (by Jonathan Bennett) (closes #2809; closes #2707)
• allow to re-order relation members (closes #2759)
• add a projection editor
• allow google maps links in goto and download dialogs
• Allow to tile (and cache) arbitrary WMS'es (only EPSG:4326 and google projection supported)
• support for WMS-C servers (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merkaartor/Documentation#WMS-C_Servers) (closes #2598)
• add the possibility to show a lat/lon grid
• Allow to zoom on the location of a GeoTIFF image
• Brazilian Portuguese translation (by Marcio Moraes)

As announced on the Merkaartor mailing lists, version 0.16 is planned to be released on 6th June. Therefore I've uploaded a git snapshot to experimental today. Please give it a try and report all problems, either to the Debian BTS or directly in the upstream bug tracker.

Version 0.16 will contain a lot of new features and various bugfixes and enhancements. For me the most important additions are support for Walking Papers and support for OpenStreetBugs. Also Merkaartor uses libgps now, so it is able to connect to recent versions of gpsd. With thanks to Chris Browet, the upstream author of Merkaartor, the next version of gpsd will ship with libQgpsmm, a C++/QT library to connect to gpsd. It should be possible to compile libQgpsmm under most platforms which are supported by QT4, including windows. Merkaartor will use libQgpsmm when available, so even Windows users will be able to use a remote gpsd instance.

Since a few days a new revision of gpsd is available in Debian/experimental. If you're a gpsd user, please give it a try as it contains various changes to the debconf templates and the config script. Although I don't expect any problems, it is better to test it well. Also there're several updates of the template translations missing and I want to give the translators some more time before uploading the package to unstable.

The other important change in the package was to add a gpsd-dbg package which contains all debug symbols and python-dbg builds of the extensions. Hopefully it will help to debug all gpsd related issues, although until now I did not have a single bug report where they would have been necessary.

Finally my thanks go to Christian Perrier and Justin B Rye for reviewing and fixing all the descriptions and templates.