[Gdal-dev] GDAL 1.2.6 Beta3 Available / New Server

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I have prepared a preliminary GDAL 1.2.6 release.  In fact, I went 
through a couple of earlier attempts today already (Beta1 and 2)
so we are already at beta3.  The beta is available from:

 http://www.gdal.org/dl

I would appreciate people trying this out, and reporting any problems
via bugzilla.  I am hoping to finalize the GDAL 1.2.6 release by late
this week or early next week at which point I will prepare a more 
complete release announcement.   In the meantime, I will include
the NEWS entries below. 

I would also note that (partly due to my sponship from ER Mapper)
I have finally rented a real dedicated server for www.gdal.org.  I 
have 1000GB/month of bandwidth available, and I would be happy
to host or mirror material for folks in related projects that have a need.

GDAL 1.2.6 - Overview of Changes
--------------------------------

gdal_translate: 
 - Added -sds switch to copy all subdatasets. 

gdalwarp: 
 - Added Thin Plate Spline support (-tps switch). 

GDALRasterBand:
 - Now uses two level block cache allowing efficient access to files
   with a very large number of tiles. 
 - Added support for YCbCr color space for raster band color interpretations.
 - Added AdviseRead() method - currently only used by ECW driver and OGDI 
   drivers. 

ILWIS Driver:
 - New driver for the raster format of the ILWIS software. 

ECW Driver:
 - Updated to use ECW SDK 3.1 (older ECW SDK no longer supported!)

ECWJP2 Driver:
 - Added JPEG2000 support driver based on ECW/JPEG2000 SDK with a variety
   of features. 

NITF Driver: 
 - Added support for reading *and* writing JPEG2000 compressed NITF files 
   using the ECW/JPEG2000 SDK. 
 - Added ICHIPB support. 

HDF Driver:
 - Add support for georeferencing from some additional metadata formats. 
 - Fixed bug with multi-band HDF-EOS datasets. 

MrSID Driver:
 - Driver can now be built as a plugin on win32. 
 - Split out MrSID 3.x SDK support - not readily buildable now. 
 - Implemented accelerated IO cases for MrSID 4.x SDK. 
 - Support for writing MrSID files added (improved?)

Imagine Driver: 
 - Fixed bug reading some large multiband Imagine files. 
 - Added support for writing compressed files. 

Win32 Builds:
 - Added versioning information to GDAL DLL.

L1B Driver:
 - Only return a reduced grid of control points. 

IDA (WinDisp4) Driver:
 - New read/write driver for the Image Display and Analysis raster format 
   used by WinDisp 4. 

GTiff Driver:
 - Added support for offset/scale being saved and loaded (special metadata). 

PNG Driver: 
 - Updated internal code for libpng to libpng 1.2.8.


OGR 1.2.6 - Overview of Changes
-------------------------------

OGRSFDriverRegistrar:
 - Added support for autoloading plugin drivers from ogr_<driver>.so. 

ogr.py:
 - Geometry, and Feature now take care of their own reference counting and
   will delete themselves when unreferenced.  Care must still be taken to
   unreference all features before destroying the corresponding 
   layer/datasource.
 - ogr.Feature fields can now be fetched and set directly as attributes. 
 - Geometry contructor can now take various formats (wkt, gml, and wkb). 
 - Added docstrings. 
 - Added better __str__ methods on several objects. 
 - Various other improvements. 

OGRLayer:
 - Re-wrote generic spatial search support to be faster in case of rectangular
   filters. 
 - Intersects() method now really uses GEOS.  This also affects all OGR 
   layer spatial filtering (with non-rectangular filters). 
 - Added SetNextByIndex() method on OGRLayer.  

OGRSpatialReference:
 - Automatically generate +towgs84 from EPSG tables when translating to
   PROJ.4 if available and TOWGS84 not specified in source WKT. 
 - Updated GML CRS translation to follow OGC 05-011 more closely.  Still
   incomplete but operational for some projections. 
 - Added support for FIPSZONE State Plane processing for old ESRI .prjs. 
 - Added Goode Homolosine support. 
 - Added GEOS (Geostationary Satellite) support.

OCI (Oracle) Driver:
 - Added GEOMETRY_NAME creation option to control the name of the field to
   hold the geometry.

PostGIS Driver:
 - Fixed some problems with truncation for integer and float list fields. 

Shapefile Driver: 
 - Added support for MapServer style spatial index (.qix). 

GML Driver: 
 - Improved support for 3L0 (GML 3 - Level 0 profile) reading and writing. 
   On read we can now use the .xsd instead of needing to build a .gfs file. 

Best regards,

-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
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