[gdal-dev] swig generated files for Perl bindings removed from repository

[Ari Jolma]

Folks,

This was discussed a while ago[1] and while there was no general 
conclusion, I believe there is no requirement for the Perl bindings to 
keep the generated files in the repository. In fact, I recommend that 
the Perl bindings are regenerated every time they are built. The only 
exception is if you are using an official release (either of GDAL itself 
or Geo::GDAL - but see below), which is guaranteed to have updated 
bindings built in the release process.

Note that "make generate" in swig/perl is not guaranteed to build 
updated bindings since the dependencies are not complete, the old ones 
need to be deleted first with "rm *wrap*".

Perl bindings are not so picky on swig version. swig version in latest 
Ubuntu is 1.3.40 and it is ok, but also 2.0.0 seem to work ok (I just 
tested). swig for windows binaries also have worked without problems.

I have been negligent at updating the Perl bindings as a CPAN module. A 
CPAN package (currently Geo-GDAL-0.23.tar.gz) can be generated from the 
bindings by "make dist". The package includes the swig generated 
bindings. Testing now it seems that building the package out of GDAL 
distribution fails due to (at least) include file swq.h not being found. 
This is a known bug[2], not related to the Perl bindings.

Ari

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2009-May/020665.html
[2] http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/3468