[gdal-dev] How to know which formats allow editing with ogrinfo?

Even Rouault even.rouault at spatialys.com
Fri Nov 15 09:55:04 PST 2019


> Can this be partly inferred from driver pages with the presence (or
> absence) of items?  For instance,
> https://gdal.org/drivers/vector/gml.html#driver-capabilities

Not really. They are only high level capabilities. Vector editing capabilities 
are not reported in driver pages

> The old driver pages
> (https://web.archive.org/web/20190211030817/https://www.gdal.org/ogr_formats
> .html) were tables that very effectively conveyed the capabilities (or
> limitations) of the drivers and allowed for scanning for drivers that
> had the capabilities that you wanted.

The information in individual pages is roughly the same as in the global 
table.

> Would a similar table be possible or desirable?

A few people have indeed noted the absence of the table. Not sure if this is 
usual "resistance to change" phenomenon or if there is there really a strong 
use case for "I don't want which format to use: let's look at the summary page 
to select one". 

If so, then yes if someone contributes it, that'd be welcome. However I think 
we'd want it to be generated from a Python script from the individual .rst 
pages, by parsing the directives like ".. supports_create::" that are in those 
.rst files. That way that would make maintainance of the summary easier (and 
initial version less tidious that doing that manually)

> There are a few things that might be missing.  The new page has
> https://gdal.org/programs/raster_common_options.html#raster-common-options
> and
> https://gdal.org/programs/vector_common_options.html#vector-common-options
> I wonder if a list of uncommon options like this would be helpful,
> https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ConfigOptions? 

Migrating the wiki page to the doc could be useful. My own opinion is that 
driver specific configuration options should be documented in the driver 
specific page, rather than in a global config option page. Same with /vsi 
specific options that should go to
https://gdal.org/user/virtual_file_systems.html if not already there. 

Or if a global list is needed, I'd say a bit the same as for driver summaries, 
have a way to compile the list of options from .rst files where they would be 
mention and link from the summary to the actual page. But we don't have 
currently any explicit directive for configuration options.

> I was also curious to see if the OSGeo technical writing project would
> impact any of the documentation.

There was initial discussion but no follow-up as far as GDAL is concerned.

Even

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