[Liblas-devel] LAS 1.2 and SRS improvements

[Howard Butler]

On Feb 17, 2009, at 5:35 PM, Hamish wrote:

>
> Howard Butler wrote:
>> Debian has the luxury of using GDAL by default, which is the only  
>> sane
>> way this should go. But I can't make GDAL a hard requirement for  
>> libLAS.
>
> how about some sort of "SRS crippled" warning to the user if  
> libgeotiff-
> only or without either of gdal/libgeotiff. (I expect the low-cal users
> don't want to see that over and over though :)
>

It's not so much crippled as "fully featured".  The GeoTIFF <-> WKT/ 
Proj4 processing of GDAL is much more developed than the simple key  
translation that a latest libgeotiff has.  Neither is perfect, but for  
those who can take the GDAL dependency, it might cause fewer headaches  
in the end.


>> Another complication is likely to arise when GDAL in turn starts
>> linking against libLAS, but we'll burn that bridge when we need to :)
>
> we solved that circular dependency in GRASS by way of the gdal- 
> plugin*.
> before that it was a complete nightmare for Debian to auto-build the
> packages. Both due to the order of compiling things**, and e.g. if a  
> new
> grass package came out, GDAL had to be rebuilt, and so the many  
> packages
> depending on GDAL had to be rebuilt, and so on, and so on.
>
> [*] http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/gdal-grass-1.4.3.tar.gz
>   see also http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libgdal1-1.5.0-grass
>   and the qgis-plugin-grass package (similar problem for QGIS<->GRASS)
>
> [**] the old method IIRC was to 1) build gdal without grass support,  
> 2)
> build grass with gdal support, 3) remove & rebuild gdal with grass  
> support.
> on 11+ hardware platforms.

Gee, that sounds awful.  Even more incentive to get this srs stuff out  
into its own library.