[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Sean Gilles, Javier Jiminez Shaw, and Alessandro Pasotti held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 11/23/2023. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Fundraising update
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Annual renewals are now going out to sponsors, so if you are a coordinator of GDAL funding in your organization, please be on the lookout for them. 

Maintenance activities update
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Dan

No activity this month

Alessandro

* Add GetExtent3D "fast" implementation for GeoJSON 
* GDAL Raster Tile Index driver review. Find out more at https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/gti.html

Even

* 3.8.3 Bugfix release. See https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.8.3/NEWS.md for release notes
* Added CodeQL analyzer via GitHub Actions. It identified nearly 300 issues, though almost all of them were false positives or unconcerning.
* Submitted GDAL to the OpenSSF for a security scorecard. It initially ranked 5.8/10, and Even completed actions to improve its score such as providing PR submissions to CodeQL. It currently ranks 9.0/10.0, with the item most contributing to its slightly reduced score being the need for more code and PR reviews (we need more PR reviews from GDAL collaborators!) See https://securityscorecards.dev/viewer/?uri=github.com/OSGeo/gdal for details on the score. 

Javier

* Javier refactored https://spatialreference.org. It now loads very fast, it is statically generated, and it is open source software that users can deploy in their own environments. Thanks again Javier!

Sean

* Sean added GitHub Actions that listen to the GDAL release tag and fire and runs rasterio's tests when a GDAL release is issued. 
* Sean added exception chaining in rasterio and this prompted a discussion about lack of enthusiasm for changing any of GDAL's error handling behaviors.

Translation Discussion

Alessandro began a discussion about the need to add language translation of open options for drivers, how the project could go about managing them. Discussion evolved to covering translation of contextual error messages and the challenge of maintaining and providing that. No action was to be taken at this time, but if this is a topic that's interesting to you, please chime in on the mailing list or in a ticket.

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 02/22/2024 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard