[PROJ] Announcing PROJ 6.0.0

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 3/3/19 6:09 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
> (Now that 6 is out, the question for packagers is when is a good time to
> actually push the update to users.  I have prepared an update for pkgsrc
> that seems to be fine, by itself and am testing other things that I have
> installed.)

Once most of the reverse dependencies that users rely on are compatible
with PROJ 6 would be good time.

Evens recent push with the GDAL dependencies is an important part, and
the PROJ 5 release also triggered some projects to move away from
projects.h like GRASS.

In Debian we have several packages that still rely on projects.h:
basemap, gnudatalanguage, gpx2shp, libgeo-proj4-perl, mapserver, navit,
paraview, pdl, python-pyproj, saga, therion, thuban, vtk6 & vtk7.

In the OSGeo stack MapServer is an important package that hasn't been
updated for PROJ 5 nor 6 yet.

> libspatialite failed to build because of proj_api.h.  The last upstream
> release seems to be from 2015-09, per
>   https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index
> but also there seems to be a beta from last August.  (pkgsrc does not
> package other than releases, unless really necessary to work around
> upstreams that don't believe in releases.)
> 
> Is anyone aware of what's expected to happen with spatialite?

SpatiaLite is in a terrible situation wrt new releases. Sandro promised
a new (beta) release three weeks ago, but that hasn't actually happened
yet. This is sadly the state of the spatialite family, there is still
some activity in fossil repositories, but it is low, the frequency of
releases is even more terrible. We only got the 5.0.0 beta after raising
concerns about the lack of 4.4 or 4.5 final release after more than two
years of no new release. The plans announced at the time of the 5.0.0
beta were promising, but turned out empty.

> How serious is the breakage without spatialite (qgis wants it)?

SpatiaLite is an important package in the geospatial ecosystem, but it
is the sick child in the family. Perhaps it's time to take it out to not
hold back the rest of the ecosystem.

Perhaps when users are confronted with distributions removing spatialite
they will be inclined to support its development. I suspect the lack of
funding and/or a healthy group of active developers is causing the
stagnation in the SpatiaLite family.

If the removal of SpatiaLite seriously affects QGIS, they may be able
allocate some of their funding to get SpatiaLite back into shape, at
least for the sake of QGIS.

Kind Regards,

Bas

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