[Gdal-dev] Proposal for Unified Windows Binaries

[Howard Butler]

All,

I think the time has arrived for us work toward releasing Windows  
binaries that coincide with software releases.  Numerous projects,  
notably WorldWind, Python Cartographic Library,  GeoTools/GeoServer,  
and many others are starting to more widely take advantage of all the  
hard work the swig bindings maintainers have been doing.   There are  
currently a number of folks generating Windows binaries, most notably  
FWTools and MS4W.

 From a user's perspective, it is almost impossible to mix and match  
the drivers and features (scripting bindings, Python utilities, etc)  
that you might need if you want to do anything out of the ordinary  
for each distribution.  Each distribution also has a very different  
aim, with MS4W mostly tracking releases and FWTools covering the  
bleeding edge.  As a purveyor of exotic drivers (ArcSDE), the  
different distributions makes it hard for me to provide support, even  
though my driver can be built as a plugin, because of the need to  
match up linkages against each distribution.

I think an "official" Windows GDAL release should have the following  
traits:
- All optional drivers built as plugins and all other drivers built in
- No scripting bindings
- No Python utilities
- Include the .lib files

Instead of a monolithic kitchen sink approach, I think it might be  
better to provide the basic building blocks, which will allow  
developers to start from the same base and augment from that.  For  
example, with "GDAL Base," we could provide the Python bindings and  
utilities as an installable package that targets each Python version  
(same for .NET bindings, Java, and so on).

Thoughts?

Howard