[Gdal-dev] python ng - existing scripts

[Howard Butler]

William,

We have bent over backwards to attempt to preserve backward  
compatibility between the older and ng python bindings, but there are  
indeed some differences.  A glaring one that impacts the usage of  
some of the scripts in /pymod is that some of those depend on  
Numeric, while the ng bindings only have numpy support.  Most of the  
method signatures and classes should behave similarly to the older  
bindings.  There are still a few things that are missing from the ng  
bindings that will need to be added (mostly GDAL related...OGR is  
pretty much complete).  I (and no one that I know of) have not  
actually gone through pymod and done any analysis to see what/where/ 
how things will need to be updated.

It is my hope that we can have the ng bindings be the default Python  
bindings for GDAL 1.5, but this goal clearly will require some more  
effort.  I agree that the utility scripts in /pymod would fit nicely  
in a /scripts or /bin target of setup.py.  I would also like to  
someday (optionally) support setuptools.  I desperately feel we need  
the GDAL python stuff in some sort of namespace as well.  Monkeying  
with our current layout in that regard is likely to cause lots of  
churn and annoyance and violates Frank's GDAL rule #1.

Another heavy user of the older bindings is OpenEV.  IIRC, OpenEV  
depends on some of the blacker magic in the older _gdalmodule, and  
significant effort would be required to bring that forward.  Frank  
can comment more, but I think that this usage was one of the major  
limiting factors in not making the ng bindings the default thus far.

In summary, going forward, the ng bindings are going to be the ones  
seeing continual development and support (especially with other  
languages like C# and Java driving a lot of the development because  
the ng bindings opened GDAL up to those languages).  I will let Frank  
comment more on what he thinks of the situation, but I seem to  
remember him stating that going forward with the ng bindings as the  
default Python bindings in 1.5 was something that he was interested in.

Howard

On Feb 17, 2007, at 4:15 PM, William Kyngesburye wrote:

> So, with the slightly different structure of python wrappers in the  
> NG/SWIG build, does this cause problems for existing python  
> scripts?  especially the scripts included in the pymod folder of  
> the source.
>
> If those scripts are OK, shouldn't they be moved out of pymod and  
> have their own install target?
>
> -----
> William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos at kyngchaos.com>
> http://www.kyngchaos.com/
>
> "This is a question about the past, is it? ... How can I tell that  
> the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy  
> between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"
>
> - The Ruler of the Universe
>
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