[gdal-dev] 1.9 Release Process

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Etienne Tourigny
<etourigny.dev at gmail.com> wrote:
> Frank, I have 2 issues I would like to address before 1.9 is released.
>
> 1) The ability to save the gdal commandline string and access it later.
>
> This is useful for the netcdf 'history' metadata, and consistent with
> all other software that manipulates netcdf files.  Suggested patch
> adds 2 functions to gdal.h (only one is really needed) and modifies
> GDALGeneralCmdLineProcessor() slightly (because that is where the
> commandline is processed).
>
> Details and small patch are in bug #4297.

Etienne,

I am ambivalent about this extension to GDAL behavior.  Note
that GDALGeneralCmdLineProcessor() is sometimes used by
broader applications where it is not appropriate to record the
commandline in dataset metadata.  Imagine if someone had
launched OpenEV with a database connection string that included
userids and passwords and then during their session they saved
a result to a netcdf files and it ended up capturing their session
commandline?

> 2) Fixes to importFromESRI - bugs #4345 and #4378
>
> I have committed a fix  to trunk (r23542) and it is optional, using a
> Configuration Option to be activated.
> It tries to fix missing parts of ESRI WKT (like TOWGS84 parameters and
> DATUM and GEOGCS EPSG codes).
> I would like to see if we can turn it on by default (at least for
> DATUM and TOWGS84).

I am terrified of this whole area of work, and have just tried
to keep away from it so I won't be responsible if it causes
problems.  I hope you will take a low risk approach to this
to minimize problems in 1.9.   I hope you are also cooperating
with ESRI staff to avoid to much conflict with their efforts.  They
have done a lot of work to try and improved the morph from/to
ESRI format and I'd hate to see that badly broken in 1.9.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer