[Gdal-dev] vrt format and absolute/relative paths

[Vincent Schut]

I'm starting to use (and like!) the vrt format more and more. However, when I 
thought I would use standard vrt files as templates for multiple directories 
that contain the same kind of data (like spot vegetation data for multiple 
dates), I found out that the vrt file loader uses the current working dir as 
path prefix for the SourceFilename, which effectively keeps me from using 
one .vrt file with relative filenames as SourceFilename and linking/copying 
that into each directory. E.g. I would like to have a vrt file that has the 
files 0001_B0.HDF, 0001_B2.HDF, 0001_B3.HDF and 0001_MIR.HDF as bands 1-4, 
and than I put that vrt file in each of my Spot Vegetation directories and if 
I then load one of the vrt files, it gives me the four HDF files from the 
directory where the vrt file is located. However, the current behaviour is 
different: it gives me the HDF files from the current directory. So if I 
issue a gdalinfo command on a vrt file from a different directory:
vincent at lowresbox spotgetation/s10$ gdalinfo 
Asian-Islands.20020601/spectral.vrt
gdal tries to load the referenced raster sources from the current directory 
(spotvegetation/s10/), and not from the local directory of the vrt file 
(spotvegetation/s10/Asian-Islands.20020601/). So in this example I would get 
an error, as there are no Spot Vegetation raster files in 
spotvegetation/s10/.

Is this behaviour intended?
If not, if would greatly help me if it could be changed so that gdal always 
uses the home directory of the current vrt file to look for the vrt raster 
source files.

Thanks,
-- 
-----------------------------
 Vincent Schut
 SarVision B.V.
 Wageningen, The Netherlands
 www.sarvision.com