[Gdal-dev] Import Gdal

[Christopher Barker]

Sean Gillies wrote:
> I think virtualenv looks like a promising tool for creating isolated, 
> replicable environments (like the ones from FWTools).

> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv

Yes, that is a cool and useful package.

However, I'm not sure it solves the python -- gdal issues. Sure, some 
folks are using python with gdal just for the utilities, etc. ( this 
would be the FWTools case), but gdal is a very useful package for 
building all sorts of stuff, and there is a lot of need for gdal to be 
just another package that plays well with everything else python, so 
that people can easily build apps using gdal and whatever other stuff 
they need.

It's not bad now -- just needs an easier installation, and the gdal 
stuff really should be put in a package. Looking in my site-packages 
dir, I have:

ogr.py
ogr.pyc
osr.py
osr.pyc
gdal.py
gdal.pyc
gdalconst.py
gdalconst.pyc
gdalnumeric.py
gdalnumeric.pyc
_gdalmodule.so

That's quite a bit of clutter. All that really should be in a "gdal" 
package directory instead. That would require a change to everyone's 
import statements, however. (that's th eonly change, though -- not bad, 
really)

It would be nice to make the change while keeping the old way around for 
a version or two (deprecated) -- on *nix, that's easy, just put in some 
symlinks -- on Windows, I don't know how to cleanly do it.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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