What the difference: mapnik and mapnik2?

Question

I use Ubuntu 12.04 LTC, postgres 9.1, postgis 2.0.

I install mapnik.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mapnik/nightly-trunk
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libmapnik mapnik-utils python-mapnik

Which version of mapnik I install? https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/Mapnik2 in this documentation write that mapnik may be 0.7 or 2.1

>>> import mapnik
>>> mapnik.mapnik_version()
300000

In synaptic: 3.0.0+dev20130906.git.f3b8645-1~precise1

Answer 1

Mapnik 2 is a major change release. There have been many updates and alterations that mean backwards compatibility is not guaranteed. See the documentation for the differences between Mapnik and Mapnik2. If you haven't previously used Mapnik, then I would recommend starting with version 2 to take advantage of the improvements and avoid problems later on.