Foss4g 2011 code sprint

Code Sprint Participants
Phil Anzel: I'm interested in the MapServer renderer:
 * 1) Contour map and stream line labeling: I wonder if some control over inter-letter spacing (especially for increasing space between TrueType letters) might reduce letter overlap, beyond the use of the MAXOVERLAPANGLE parameter. Also I wonder if some local allowance for very erratic lines (with lots of short line segments) might relax label placement rules and provide for more label locations. Network willing, I can show some examples.
 * 2) Data source unavailability: can map image generation tolerate failure of individual DATA sources? Would it be possible to specify a retry mechanism? I'm thinking of data coming from either remote WFS, WMS (where there already exists a timeout specifier), or from ODBC sources. For example, if I'm somehow retrieving individual Bing tiles, and Bing is sluggish (I do not know if it is Bing or my environment), could I skip unavailable tiles? I've got more details on this specific use, and am certainly up for counsel.
 * 3) Robustness of SWIG wrapper for Map object: if instantiating and using the Map object in the DotNet environment (in C#), when the Map object instance is destroyed, is all native Map object memory freed? I'm doing this from memory at the moment, I have a specific code example that I'd like to talk about.