== Bugfix and Usability Release ==

(For all the details see the [http://trac.mapnik.org/wiki/Release0.6.1 CHANGELOG])

• Major push on python pickling support (#345)
• Smoother Scons builds through improved Auto-Detection of Boost install
• Adding a testing framework that uses nose:
  {{{
  sudo easy_install nose
  python tests/run_tests.py
  }}}
• Optional Serialization of default values in xml
• Lots of PPC/endian fixes (still some needed for color support in milestone:0.6.2)
• Fixes to the OGR/GDAL/SQLite and Raster plugins
• libxml2 is the new xml parser in Windows binaries and requires escaping otherwise illegal characters with entities like > and < for > and <
• All relative paths in the xml file used for datasources and symbols are now interpreted as relative to the XML file (r1124). Use
  {{{

}}} to maintain previous behavior which was to interpret paths relative to the location of the script calling load_map().