[Gdal-dev] problems with some formats

[Frank Warmerdam]

Vladimir Slepnev wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> the 03/03/03 update of GDAL seems to have the HFA format broken. Under
> Windows, GDAL just crashes (without any error messages) when trying to open
> an IMG file.

Vladimir,

There have been changes in the HFA driver.  Can you be more specific
about what goes wrong?  Perhaps providing a traceback, or a specific
gdal_translate case that reproduce the problem?

I have just run my "HFA" driver autotest on windows and it seems to work fine.

I would stress that it is wise to do a clean build (ie. "nmake /f makefile.vc
clean" and then "nmake /f makefile.vc") after updating from CVS after a while
away.

> Also, we still can't get ECW and JPEG2000 to work under Windows. When trying
> to open a JPEG2000 file, GDAL crashes (We plugged in the new version of
> JasPer from the GDAL website, modified the makefiles, etc., so I guess it's
> not some stupid mistake on our part. I've already made a number of posts to
> gdal-dev on the subject. It's clearly a Windows problem.) Also, GDAL always
> fails to create an ECW file  - NULL is returned (we have the ECW SDK
> installed and made the necessary changes to the GDAL build).

I will leave the JPEG2000 issue to Andrey.  Perhaps you are using a more
recent version of the ECW SDK than I am.  I just tried doing a
"gdal_translate -of ECW utm.tif utm.ecw" and it seems to have worked just
fine.

> One may say that we should use the latest GDAL update. But this turns out to
> be not the best policy for us - we already have about 5 different versions
> of gdal11.dll, which work differently. For example, I just tried to update
> GDAL through CVS. After that, nmake /f makefile.vc produced an error:
> 
> nmake.opt(56) : fatal error U1034: syntax error : separator missing
> 
> I guess we're just unlucky to use the Windows 2000 platform :-)
> I really apologize for being so rude to you all :-)

For "production" use I would encourage you to manage your own staging of
internal GDAL releases, only passing a GDAL version on to production use once
you are sure all the things you require are working.  As you test a version
(perhaps CVS head) report errors and we will fix them as quickly as we can.
I find it odd that you are running into many problems that I cannot easily
reproduce on my windows system.

Also, you might want to check the GDAL autotest suite out of CVS and try
it.  There isn't too much there yet, but it is growing.  If specific
tests fail you can report that and it gives us something more concrete
to test against.  I will also try to add new tests corresponding to
problem areas for the future.

Working on Windows should be fine with GDAL, with the caveat that occationally
we won't keep the makefile.vc's up to date.  You shouldn't be encountering as
many problems as you are lately.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent