[GRASS-dev] [GRASS GIS] #32: r.what: shouldn't use static buffers for the inputs

[Moritz Lennert]

On Mon, February 18, 2008 02:59, Glynn Clements wrote:
>
> Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>
>>  > Even if v.what.rast doesn't end up calling into GDAL, it won't even
>>  > run if libgdal won't load (e.g. if one of GDAL's many dependencies
>>  > fails to load).
>>
>> 	Just out of curiosity, would it make sense to split `libvect'
>> 	into two libraries, one depending on GDAL and one not, so that
>> 	some basic vector operations would be available irrespective to
>> 	GDAL's presence?
>
> The problem is that the vector reading code all depends upon OGR. The
> vector library understands two types of vector map: native and OGR.
> The top-level input functions (open, rewind, read, close) all dispatch
> to the corresponding native or OGR function depending upon the map
> type.
>
> You can build without OGR support, in which case it only supports the
> native format. But if you build with OGR support, the generic vector
> input functions all depend upon OGR. So, a separate library of vector
> functions which don't depend upon GDAL/OGR wouldn't include the
> ability to read vector maps, which probably wouldn't be much use.

Also out of pure curiosity: I really don't understand why this is so. Gdal
and ogr are only necessary to import/export vector data and to treat maps
linked into grass via v.external. I would guess that most users that
really work with vector maps in grass import them into GRASS' native
format and thus don't need any ogr features from then on. So is the
dependency of ogr only there for v.external ?

Moritz