[gdal-dev] FITS Format Support for GDAL

[Simon Perkins]

Hi,

I have just checked in an update on the GDAL FITS driver that allows the
reading and writing of metadata to FITS files. From the ChangeLog:

Upon opening a FITS file, all non trivial headers are read from
the file and stored in the metadata store. Upon closing the FITS
file, any metadata associated with a name that is 8 characters or
less long, is written to the FITS file. The driver attempts to
guess the type of the metadata (double, long, logical or string)
and calls the appropriate fits update functions.

As far as I can tell this is the first driver which attempts to write
metadata to the file (rather than just read it), so I'd be interested in
any comments/criticisms on how I chose to do it. I'll probably add
something to GeoTIFF to do something similar with respect to the
standard tags that it stores in metadata. This functionality is required
for the application in which I'm using GDAL.

Cheers,

Sy