[Gdal-dev] RFC 12: Improved File Management

[Ray Gardener]

Hmm... I'm partial to the opposite route: abstracting away details like 
the structure of datasets, since they're driver-dependant. Do callers 
really need to know how datasets are organized? Is it even a warranted 
assumption that the data is on a filesystem? The more we get away from a 
black box model, the more maintenance it's going to be; the API surface 
area keeps going up and increases the combinatorial effects. No offence, 
but an RFC like this seems more like solving a symptom instead of a root 
cause.

GDAL should do all file and filesystem I/O as callbacks, and a utility 
reference library built on top that implements the callbacks for common 
cases like C stdlib I/O, GUI filesys browsers, etc. The more GDAL 
continues to know about files and filesys details, the more painful it's 
going to get.

Ray