[gdal-dev] Un-vendoring a number of third-party libraries?

[Howard Butler]

> On Dec 15, 2023, at 8:35 AM, Even Rouault via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
> 
> Thoughts ? (given the length of the email, it should probably be formalized as a RFC. I'll do that, unless there is a massive uprising against the proposal...)


If the scope of this were to unvendor just these four (libjpeg, libpng, zlib, giflib), I think it is enough to start, but it brings up the question of whether or not JPEG, PNG, and GIF support are hard dependencies in GDAL afterward. They're always available no matter how you build  now, so would we make them hard dependencies or relax them to optional after unvendoring? I assume zlib would move to a hard dependency of GDAL.

Howard