Fwd: Re: [gdal-dev] FWTools and GDAL 1.7.0

[Tamas Szekeres]

Jason,

I appreciate the expertise for all of you along with this thread, I could
already gather quite some useful information from here for this reason. I
must mention that my programming practice in Python can be considered as
zero, this is the main reason that my issues may have trivial solutions for
the hardcore pythonists but not trivial to me. Apologies for this
inconvenience :-)

Getting back to the original topic, you mention that the gdal binaries
should be installed somewhere an set PATH, GDAL_DATA, PROJ_LIB and
GDAL_DRIVER_PATH as a systemwide setting. This is where the problems of mine
are starting. Modifying the PATH globally is a bad practice in 99% of the
cases. The only case I'm aware of which may not be a problem when we make
sure that only one version of such files (dll-s and executables) will ever
be installed to a particular system. But this is not the case with the gdal
binaries as I would expect at least a development or a stable version (and
their x86/x64 variants) to coexist which should be used by the same user.
The same problem may arise when we would like to install multiple versions
to the site packages directory, how the versions of the files are maintained
by the python runtime? In this regard I could mention something like what
have been done with the .NET framework with the multiple versions of the
packages installed simultaneously in the global assembly cache. The
individual packages may specify the required minimum version of the referred
packages loaded by the .NET runtime. Is this something that can be done with
the python environment as well?

(As opposed to this, the dumb solution of having a starting script to open a
command prompt (and setting PYTHONPATH properly) would ensure multiple
versions to be used at the same time, since those settings are applyed to
the cmd process solely.)

Best regards,

Tamas
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