[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, and Alessandro Pasotti held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 09/28/2023. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Fundraising update
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Good news on fundraising: Amazon Web Services, who had previously announced they were not going to be able to renew their Gold level sponsorship for 2024, was able to reverse the decision and continue sponsoring GDAL at the same level for the next year.

Also Maxar, who had previously announced they were not going to be able to renew their Gold level for 2024, was able to reverse the decision and continue sponsoring GDAL for the next year the Bronze level.

Thanks again to the advocates within both of these organizations for continuing to push for resources despite being told 'no'. We still have a number of renewals to complete before we are done for the cycle this year. 

Maintenance activities update
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* Even attended the NumFOCUS Project Summit September 11-13th in Amsterdam. https://www.summit.numfocus.org/ where he gave a lightning talk about GDAL's extensive CI system http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/presentations/NumFocus%20Summit%202023%20Tour%20of%20tools%20used%20by%20GDAL%20CI%2C%20testing%20and%20documentation.pdf and discussed Arrow topics with Joris Van den Bossche and Martin Fleischmann of the GeoPandas project. He provided a full report to the GDAL PSC about his attendance.

* Even coordinated and issued the GDAL 3.7.2 release. Detailed release notes about what it included can be found at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.7.2/NEWS.md

*Even coordinated and issued the libtiff 4.6.0 release. Detailed release notes about what it included can be found at https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/releases/v4.6.0

* Even spent significant time updating the PDF driver in response to QGIS performance scenarios that showed it needed attention. This included updating the backend to use Podofo 0.10.

* Even wrote RFC 95 to align GDAL's integer types with typical stdint approaches. https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8399 It was decided to table implementation until GDAL has its next major (4.0) release. The next release, 3.8.0 due this fall, is not intended to be that major release.

* Maintainers had a short discussion about adding something like an GDALOpenJSON method to allow applications to provide a single JSON data structure for layer and data source options, along with VSI protocol hints and (maybe) environment variables. Discussion about such an idea should continue in open forums such as the mailing list.

* Alessandro worked on the subdataset API and thought about approaches to provide the entire set of option possibilities (paths, open options, dataset options, etc), which prompted the GDALOpenJSON discussion above.

* Dan continued working through making all of the GDAL test suite tests run independently. That important milestone is almost complete.

* Dan exposed GDALClose to the Python bindings in support of explicit destruction of resources for the test suite (rather than hoping __del__ does it by dropping a reference).

* Dan began working up a Ubuntu 22.04-based CI test container.

Upcoming Events
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* FOSS4GNA 2023 is being held in Baltimore, Maryland, USA on October 23-25th.

* OSGeo 2023 Community Sprint will be held in Vienna, Austria November 6-9th, 2023. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Community_Sprint_2023 GDAL PSC members seeking travel support should contact Howard Butler privately to coordinate.

Next Meeting
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The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 10/26/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard