[gdal-dev] Installing test databases/servers online for the GDAL project

[Tamas Szekeres]

Folks,

I'm not totally sure whether this topic has already been discussed or
not, however I'd like to see your opinion about.

I've just worked on adding further drivers to Windows buildbot slaves,
as I consider it would be reasonable to have them regularly tested
especialy during the beta/release period of the GDAL project. I've
noticed that many of the tests rely on the existence of some external
servers like for mysql, oci, sde, pgsql, wcs. Currently none of these
servers are available online therefore those tests are skipped in the
testing process.

I'd wonder if we could somehow get those servers online, however I'm
not sure who is responsible to maintain the corresponding databases.
Assuming that there's no explicit owner of these servers would it be
reasonable to establish such test servers for the GDAL project
permanently?

Another benefit of such an addition would be that the developers could
track down and fix issues related to these drivers without having to
wait for the component owner to take the required action. Most of the
developers (like me) cannot afford spending such amount of $$$ to have
those servers (like SDE or Oracle Spatial) installed locally, but I
sometimes have a couple of issues reported with SDE and OCI which
should be handled in short term.

One of the issues have to be considered in this topic is a security
related problem, I guess it's undesired to allow everyone to have
read/write access to those databases, however I think we could
separate those connection strings from the autotest scripts and load
them from an external file by the scripts.

I expect the GDAL project could collect enough sponsorship to support
and mainain these servers or we could also establish that OSGEO-wide
if the idea seems reasonable for the other projects as well.


Any ideas?


Best regards,

Tamas