[Gdal-dev] Radical OGR Update

[Andrey Kiselev]

Frank,

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 02:39:17AM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>  o Merge the driver architectures of GDAL and OGR, so there is one driver
>    registry, and a call to GDALOpen() can be used to open raster and
>    vector datasets.
>  o OGRDataSource and OGRLayer would be derived from GDALMajorObject which
>    provides metadata services.
...
>  o Some degree of merger between GDALDataset and OGRDataSource would be
>    achieved so it would become possible to have a single dataset with
>    both raster bands and vector layers.  For instance, for formats
>    like PCIDSK, OGDI datasources, and DODS datasources.  The raster
>    and vector SDTS drivers would be merged.

This is very good idea and it greatly simplifies GDAL for users (and it
seems for driver developers too). I like it.

> It seems that if I am going to make a change of this magnitude, it
> would be best to do so before the 1.2.0 release cycle.

Those changes will take a time for implementing and especially for
testing. What about releasing GDAL 1.1.10 shortly? libtool environment
seems to work good: GDAL builds on all 9 Debian architectures, it builds
in native MinGW and Cygwin environments and it even builds with my old
MinGW cross-compiler (and Alessandro reported it builds with the newer
cross-compiler on Debian unstable). So it seems to be more robust than
previous build system.

> One other change I am kicking around is to allow passing options into
> the Open() call.

This is a feature we should have. I think we need two optional
parameters: one is a subdataset number to open and another is open
option. So interactive tools will not display all that ugly subdataset
names, but only show their descriptions and numbers, like OpenEV does.

						Andrey

-- 
Andrey V. Kiselev
Home phone:  +7 812 5274898  ICQ# 26871517