[GRASS5] A naive opinion on how grass *should* work

[Glynn Clements]

Russell Nelson wrote:

> > r.in.gdal fully supports GeoTIFF (among others).  There are import
> > routines for some image types that don't have such information. r.in.bin
> > supports generic raw binary formats, for instance.
> 
> Okay, then perhaps libgdal should be required to build grass, and
> should be distributed with (or at least alongside) grass.  I was quite 
> confused when r.in.gdal complained that it couldn't find a shared
> library.  Can someone explain what problem is solved by building
> r.in.gdal even though libgdal is unavailable?

The main reason that this is allowed is because GDAL already supports
it, in that GDAL comes with the necessary code to load libgdal
dynamically and access it through function pointers.

Other than that, it can help to work around the problems which result
from GDAL being written in C++, namely very specific library
dependencies, which typically result in a given binary only working on
a very specific platform.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>