[gdal-dev] GDAL drivers written in Python

[Antonio Valentino]

Hi Knut-Frode,

Il giorno Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:51:42 +0200
Knut-Frode Dagestad <knutfrodesoppel at hotmail.com> ha scritto:

> Hi,
> 
> Our group is looking at the possibility to use GDAL with Python
> bindings for our work with satellite data. One limitation seems
> however to be missing/incomplete drivers, as we have no capacity to
> implement new drivers in C.

It would be interesting to know which are the missing formats and the
missing features in existing drivers.
I use GDAL Python bindings to read satellite data of SAR missions and
I'm very interested GDAL to have the best possible support for this
kind of data.
So maybe I could help in some way if you provide some more info.

> It seems however to me that the Python API allows to create GDAL 
> Datasets from data which in principle could be read by any non-GDAL 
> functions, e.g. PyHDF or self-made Python readers.

Yes, correct

> My question is therefore: is there in principle any important 
> differences or limitations with datasets created this way, compared
> to datasets read with native GDAL drivers?
> 
> Best regards from Knut-Frode

GDAL dataset are an abstraction of the real datasets on file so, once
created, there is no difference between datasets.

IMHO, also depending on the version of GDAL you, python bindings
could miss some function that is present in the C/C++ API so creating a
new dataset from scratch with the Python API could be a little harder
in some very particular case.

regards

-- 
Antonio Valentino