Revision history for Perl extension Geo::PostalCode.

0.07 05/22/2006

• Added support for building the DB files from the more recent zip-code data here:

  http://civicspacelabs.org/releases/zipcodes/zipcodes-csv-10-Aug-2004.tgz

The old data will continue to work. (Sam Tregar)

The following changes contributed by Scott Gifford of HomeSurfUSA.com

Subclassing

• Move database installation code from load.pl into a module, to make subclassing easier.
• Modify instructions to discuss proposed "Geo::PostalCode::US" to get US postal codes.

New Functionality

• You can specify constructor arguments "units" or "earth_radius" to change the units that Geo::PostalCode operates in. By default it supports miles and kilometers, but it can support any unit if you provide the earth's radius in that unit.

Speed Improvements for Very Large Searches

• Allow overriding B-Tree cache size with "cachesize" constructor argument.
• Very small speedups in query_postal_codes.

Major Cleanup

• All required files for testing included in package, so that a "make test" from CPAN will succeed.

Minor Cleanup

• Better error checking of database tie commands.
• Minor syntax fixes to split.
• Use name "geo_postalcode_makedb" instead of "load.pl", so it can be installed in a bin directory.

0.06 09/24/2003

Scott Gifford contribed the following changes   * query_postal_codes contained some errors:

    + It assumed that the space between single degrees of latitude and       longitude are the same.  This only holds true at the equator;       otherwise the distance between two degrees longitude is:

          cos($latPI/180)LON_MILEAGE_CONSTANT

      This formula is probably well-known, but I got it from:

          http://www.malaysiagis.com/related_technologies/mapping/basics1b.cfm

      This corrected a bug where the cells searched would often miss       areas that were a ways away from the site.

    + There were bugs when the search radius crossed the poles, the       prime meridian, or the -180/180 longitude line.  All of these       are now fixed in various ways (see the code).    
    + postal_code attribute was sometimes not returned correctly for       some results.

  * query_postal_codes now searches for ZIP codes whose distances are     inside or exactly at the search radius, instead of strictly     inside (<= instead of <).

  * The search algorithm has gotten complex, so I re-implemented     nearby_postal_codes in terms of query_postal_codes.  Benchmarking     shows that this doesn't introduce much of a performance hit, and     it makes the code much more maintainable.

  * A bug in test_near when the $cell and $center were on opposite     sides of the -180/180 longitude line caused a cell to be missed.

  * Modified load.pl to take an optional parameter with a filename to     build from.

  * Corrected 01_basic.t with new results based on modified code.

  * Added regression test 02_polevault for near poles, prime meridian,     and 180/-180 latitude line, including test data edgetest.data

0.05 08/19/2002

• Fix for load.pl on FreeBSD and Mac OS X (Andrew Brosnan)
• more POD fixes

0.04 07/18/2002

• POD fixes (Paul Kooros)
• Error handling for load.pl (Paul Kooros)

0.03 05/17/2002

• Work around for Perl/Berkeley DB bug in load.pl (Kyle Dawkins)
• Improved accurancy of PI

0.02 12/23/2001

• Documentation fixes

0.01 10/27/2001

• original version; created by h2xs 1.19