[gdal-dev] libLas

[Howard Butler]

On May 27, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Clay, Bruce wrote:

> Are there any plans to fold libLas into the GDAL development tree?

No.  libLAS is an entirely separate software project.  Additionally,  
its object model and data type (extremely dense point clouds with  
attributes) doesn't cleanly map to anything in GDAL or OGR.  It is  
highly unlikely it will be included in GDAL in the near future.


> In it’s current offshoot it takes quite a bit of manipulation due to  
> the dependencies.

libLAS is not a development offshoot of GDAL.  It is a separate  
software project.  libLAS' only relation to GDAL is the las2ogr tool  
and libLAS' ability to optionally use GDAL for well known text spatial  
referencing system description support.  I would also note that libLAS  
has no required dependencies.  libgeotiff, GDAL, and libspatialindex  
(in trunk) are all optional dependencies to support spatial  
referencing and (at the next release) spatial indexing.

> I even had one link error for stlPort for a dependency.

Were you compiling with MSVC 6?  Only MSVC 7.1+ is supported or tested  
on Windows.  When compiling on 7.1+, there should be no stlport  
dependency.

> I did manage to get liblas.lib but Visual Studio complained a bunch  
> about duplicate declarations.

It would be appropriate to participate on the liblas-devel mailing  
list with your experiences and feedback on libLAS.

>
> I tried to build using the gdal-1.6.1 source tree but  
> geo_simpletags.h is not in that path so used libgeotiff-1.2.5 which  
> requires libTiff, jpeg-6b etc

libLAS can be built against a GDAL trunk source tree (1.7+, which has  
not been released) or against a libgeotiff-1.2.5 tree for LAS spatial  
referencing system support.  There was a bug in 1.2.5 that prevents  
GeoTIFF ASCII tags from being used through the simpletags interface,  
however.