[gdal-dev] Tickets 2385 and 2683 (ECW and MrSID plugins)

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 11:38:58AM +0200, Tamas Szekeres wrote:
> 2009/5/4 Agustin Lobo <alobolistas at gmail.com>
> 
> >
> > Actually, this support is present for windows binary distributions of QGIS,
> > provided the user takes the steps described at the end of page
> > http://sites.google.com/site/eospansite/qsig-for-windows
> > (mainly thanks to directions provided by Micha Silver) for example. But
> > the same type of solution does not exist for any binary distribution of
> > QGIS
> > for Linux.
> >
> 
> Agustin,
> 
> I have an impression that this is because the GDAL Windows builds support
> building ECW as a plugin but this is not the case with the linux builds by
> default, isn't it?

Currently - but for some patches a la gdal-grass - building of a plugin 
is not supported on linux, and anyway (but this is Debian/Ubuntu specific) 
it is not supportable by distributions due to the external SDK licenses. That's the 
reason to allow external plugins by separated building units on Linux: that 
would avoid user to rebuild the whole beast from scratch...

> By this means it would indeed be reasonable to establish the counterpart of
> this option (like Frank suggested by using a --with-ecw-as-plugin option) in
> the default configuration mechanism, but using a completely different
> compilation line would be quite undesired.
> 
> Feel free to open up a ticket in this topic, I hope someone will be able to
> take care of it (patches are welcomed).
> 

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine