This is primarily a bug fix release and includes the following key changes:

• 70 Bugs closed
• Added locale tab to options dialog so that locale can be overridden
• Cleanups and additions to GRASS tools
• Python Plugin Installer for installing plugins from the PyQGIS repository
• Documentation updates
• Improvements for building under MSVC

Packages for a number of platforms are available at download.qgis.org

Many thanks to all those who have contributed in testing, reporting

From the QGIS Development Team:

It is our great pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Quantum GIS (QGIS) Version 0.9.0. See below for press release:

Quantum GIS (QGIS) is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. QGIS supports vector, raster, and database formats. QGIS is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Dear all

1) Can I get a quick straw poll for the question: Can we delete all the automake stuff from svn for this release?

Respond with +1, 0 or -1 as per normal.

2) I have the checklist for the 0.9.0 release up at

http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/ReleaseChecklist0.9

QGIS 0.8.1 is released and with it my first stint in my new role as Release Manager. I would like to say a very big 'thank you' to all the people who helped squash bugs, submit patches, convert the build system in 0.8 branch to cmake, update the msys environment and so on. Since it was my first time orchestrating a release, there were a few kinks in the process which hopefully will not be repeated in the next release.

Thanks to Martin Dobias' work on the GRASS raster problem, we now have a 0.8.1 test version that includes the raster fix, as well as all the other changes in the upcoming 0.8.1 release.

Please feel free to download and test this version. The setup file is available here: http://download.qgis.org/qgis/win32/qgis_setup0.8.1-rc1.exe (52Mb)

I've made a new preview build (windows only) for the upcoming QGIS 0.8.1 release. The 0.8.1 release will be primarily a bugfix release. There are two notable new features though:

* Many GRASS modules have been added to the GRASS toolbox
* The launcher plugin has been added to the list of available plugins

As you may be aware we are working on getting QGIS 0.8.1 bug fix release out the door. I have made a preview build for windows...

As you may realise, packaging QGIS 0.8 for all the different linux distros is a near impossible task. Additionally we have the issue of older distros not having qt 4.2.x and many IT depts probably won't be keen to start deploying new versions of distros to meet QGIS dependencies. When I was promoting the move to qt4 I promised to build a statically compiled version of QGIS or something to provide an option for folks with no Qt4 on their machines.

Binaries for most supported platforms, including Debian Etch, SuSE 10.2,
Ubuntu Edgy, OS X, and Windows are available at http://download.qgis.org. The
source code is also available, as is a Gentoo ebuild. In the coming days we also hope to have a binary bundle that will run on any Linux platform.

The QGIS development team released version 0.8 ('Titan') on December 29th. At present this is primarily a source release for those that want to build QGIS. Packages for most Linux distributions, Windows, and Mac OS X are being assembled and should be available in the next few days.

In addition to the source, we currently have available packages for Debian Testing (Etch) and SuSE 10.2.

All packages and source are available at http://download.qgis.org.