[gdal-dev] Small meshing utility

[Chris Barker]

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Tim Keitt <tkeitt at gmail.com> wrote:

>> cool! though I"m a little confused as to how this fits with OGR.
>
> OGR is used for i/o.
>

I see -- so you've written something like the triangle command line
utility, but with OGR for IO, so you don't need to use triangles
particular data file format? sounds useful.

>> Also -- how did you deal with the fact that triangle calls the system
>> exit() function on error -- that could bring down whatever your host
>> process is.
>
> Its a simple command line utility. Not much harm done if it calls exit.

I see -- I was thinking you'd extended the OGR library, rather than
the OGR command line tools. I get it now.

>> We've written a wrapper around triangle for Python (anyone feel free
>> to send me a note if you're interested), and we ended up handling that
>> by spawning another process to run triangle in -- but that has
>> performance issues (copying data around) which would be nice to avoid.
>
> I don't call triangle, I pass arguments to the C-level API.

neither do we -- we also use the C-API -- but if you need to run it in
another process you need to ass the data around somehow -- and if you
want to call it as a library from a longer-running application, then
the calls to exit() will kill you (well, kill your app...) if you
don't run it in another process.

>> If only triangle has a nicer licensing scheme -- it really is a nice utility.
>
> Only prohibition is you can't sell it without a license.

well, "commercial" is not clearly defined in the license -- why not
just GPL the darn thing!

and it's not BSD-compatible in any case.

-Chris



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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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