Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Michael Sumner, 
and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 
12/19/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Sponsorship Activity
----------------------------

* Sparkgeo has renewed for 2024 as a Bronze sponsor. Thanks again Sparkgeo for 
your organization's continued sustaining support of the GDAL Maintenance 
Program!

Project News
----------------------------

The GDAL Sponsorship Program has engaged with the maintainer of the Breathe 
project https://github.com/breathe-doc/breathe/ to support maintenance work in 
the form of a small grant. Besides GDAL, a number of C++ projects use Breathe 
to integrate Doxygen output with the Sphinx documentation system, but its 
releases have not kept up with changes in both. The grant is intended to bring 
its maintenance current. See 
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2024-December/059899.html for more 
details.

Maintenance activities update
------------------------------------------

Alessandro

* Contract renewal and bureaucratic challenges
* OGR SQL schema implementation
* GDALDriverHasOpenOption to allow drivers to advertise options. This is needed 
to support convenient usage of the OGR SQL schema overrides via applications 
like ogr2ogr


Dan

* New NASA contract now in place
* Published user survey results at 
https://gdal.org/en/stable/community/user_survey_2024.html 
* Tuning and documenting of the new VRT expression capabilities. Vendoring the 
exprtk library may add too much code to GDAL (increasing .so size by several 
megabytes). Currently looking at alternatives
* Documentation improvements to gdalwarp and gdalbuildvrt

Even

* RFC 104 – the 'gdal` command 
https://gdal.org/en/latest/development/rfc/rfc104_gdal_cli.html is now 
available in master and ready for testing. Multiple major releases will need to 
go by before its interface and usage are fixed in regards to backward 
compatibility. It needs extensive testing and usage, and we look to the 
community who asked for it in the user survey to come forward to shape its 
future.
* Activity in 60+ ticket and PRs
* OpenJPEG 2.5.3 release support to include Tile Length Markers for optimized 
decoding
* Added DuckDB spatial support when libduckdb is available.
* A "native thread safe driver" based on libertiff that is almost entirely free 
of libtiff and libgeotiff but currently defers to them when necessary. It is 
read only, bypasses the GDAL tile cache, and uses a single FILE* for data 
access. Here be dragons, but applications looking for high throughput TIFF 
support can use it for performant parallel read access. 
* Follow-on discussion about libertiff driver usage in PROJ, which provides the 
possibility of removing PROJ's current libtiff dependency entirely. See 
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2024-December/059951.html to join in 
the discussion on the topic.

Michael

* Discussion about Zarr implementation from GDAL's perspective and the need for 
a true native Zarr library to support application usage from GDAL and others.

Javier

* No updates.


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 01/23/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR 
contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard


_______________________________________________
gdal-dev mailing list
gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org
https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev

Reply via email to