gdal/mapserver build question

[Ed McNierney]

B -

This sounds like the classic "IT would prefer to support the software
automatically distributed by the vendor, rather than support the stuff
that actually works".

Your assumption is correct.  If you build MapServer with GDAL and build
GDAL using the internal LIBTIFF and LIBGEOTIFF support, you will end up
with a functional version of GDAL and MapServer that is blissfully
ignorant of whatever versions of libtiff and libgeotiff are or are not
installed by Red Hat.  Updates to libtiff and libgeotiff happen rarely
(although they happen more often than Red Hat seems to notice) and
there's no reason you need to worry about having a version more recent
than the internal GDAL versions.

     - Ed

Ed McNierney
TopoZone.com

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of B Tuttle
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 7:21 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] gdal/mapserver build question

This is predominantly a GDAL question, but as we intend to use it woth
mapserver I wanted to make sure to get the mapserver angle for the
answer to this question. Apologies if this should have gone to a
different list.
I am trying to get mapserver (4.10.0) running on a Redhat 4 server. I
have discovered that Redhats version of libtiff does not support LZW
encoding, which we will need to use due to our file sizes. In the GDAL
(1.3.2) configure options I came across  the following:

  --with-libz=ARG       Include libz support (ARG=internal or libz
directory)
  --with-pcraster=ARG   Include PCRaster (libcsf) support
(ARG=internal, no or path)
  --with-png=ARG        Include PNG support (ARG=internal, no or path)
  --with-libtiff=ARG    Libtiff library to use (ARG=internal, yes or
path)
  --with-geotiff=ARG    Libgeotiff library to use (ARG=internal, yes or
path)
  --with-jpeg=ARG       Include JPEG support (ARG=internal, no or path)
  --with-gif=ARG        Include GIF support (ARG=internal, no or path)

Building without reference to Libtiff seems to allow LZW encodding.
The IT people who will be maintaing the box I am working on would
rather not have to deal with installing libraries (ie a new libtiff)
which would not be covered by redhats up2date. So I am wondering if
there are any pitfalls anyone is aware of to using the gdal internal
support, in particular for tiff/geotiff, but also for the other
formats above. Seems like this would avoid the possiblity of library
updates breaking something. Any thoughts or reccomendations would be
greatly appreciated.