[Liblas-devel] libLAS 1.7.0b1 Released

[Howard Butler]

All,

The libLAS team is pleased to announce the release of 1.7.0b1.

A large number of issues have been resolved since the 1.6.0 final release, and all items that were fixed in 1.6.1 and above are included in this list.  See [1] for a fully detailed list.

IMPORTANT NOTES
---------------------------

A significant (and frankly embarrassing) performance issue has been relieved in libLAS 1.7.0b1.  See <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/238> for more details, but the jist of it is that a hammer is not always the right tool for the job :)

Two requirements have been bumped to later versions of software:
* LASzip 2.0+ is required if you wish to enable libLAS 1.7.0+ to read/write .laz files <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/233>
* GDAL 1.7.0+ is now required for coordinate system description and reprojection <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/234>. 
* libgeotiff 1.3.0+ is highly recommended, but things will continue to work in a degraded form with respect to vertical datum properties with older libgeotiff versions.

Highlights of features added in this release include:

C API
------------------

* LASReader_GetSummaryXML method was added to C API <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/236>
* LASPoint_GetXML and LASHeader_GetXML were added to C API <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/229>
* LASHeader_SetHeaderPadding and LASHeader_GetHeaderPadding <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/239>

Python API
------------------

* Python can now access raw point data <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/237>
* liblas.header.Header, liblas.point.Point, and liblas.file.File have .xml properties for summary information <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/236> and <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/229>
* Access to get/set raw xyz data <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/228>

LASzip support
--------------------

* If found LASzip is linked in by default <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/235>
* Better error handling <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/232>

Bugs fixed include:

* libLAS now writes 0xAABB by default into reserved field of VLRs <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/217> for all LAS versions. It's a small nit as to whether or not this should be required for all LAS versions after 1.0
* mmap support for the liblas::Chipper <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/230>
* liblas-config was putting Boost library noise in --libs line <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/231>
* liblas::Point::SetHeader was not scaling data properly when the header's size was not changing <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/226>
* txt2las was not writing RGB properly due to not setting the point's header <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/224>
* Indexing was failing to build in situations with highly concentrated points <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/223>
* `lasinfo --point --xml` was not printing valid xml <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/210>
* USE_BOOST_IO was not properly closing files <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/209>
* libLAS was not properly closing up some stream types <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/213>
* lasinfo was reporting "None" for spatial references for files that had GeoTIFF keys in the case when libLAS was built without GeoTIFF/GDAL support
* The default build type is now "Release".  There's a huge performance difference <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/215>, and you should make sure to build as "Release" if you think things are too slow

The OSGeo4W build has been updated, and you can fetch the latest by updating (or installing fresh) from there on Windows.  Otherwise http://liblas.org/download.html is where you can grab the latest source.

http://liblas.org/download.html

Howard

[1] <http://trac.liblas.org/query?milestone=1.7.0&milestone=1.6.1&group=resolution&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&order=priority>