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

[Christopher Barker]

On 1/6/11 12:31 PM, Jason Roberts wrote:
> Here are some comments on specific parts of your mail:
>> Program Files\GDAL\1.6\gdal.dll
>>    and
>> Program Files\GDAL\1.6\gdal.dll

> Those would be reasonable locations for GDAL to live if the GDAL team
> decided to distribute the GDAL binaries using an installer that adhered to
> the best practices on Windows.

I *think* we're heading for a consensus to do that, but not many people 
have been on this thread.

> Incidentally, Windows does support both symbolic and hard links, although it
> is not widely known, and I'm not sure I'd recommend their use for this
> particular problem.

I've heard that, but never seen it done.

> You are probably thinking of the first rule in that list, "the directory
> where the executable module for the current process is located", i.e. the
> .exe file. In most cases, this is C:\PythonXY\python.exe. C:\PythonXY is
> probably not an appropriate location for the GDAL DLLs. Plus it would not
> work for other executables that host the Python interpreter, such as
> C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Bin\ArcMap.exe.

What about C:\PYTHON26\libs ?

or is that for the main python distro only?

> Incidentally, the Python interpreter itself is in a DLL that Python installs
> in C:\Windows\system32, which is always very high up in the PATH. GDAL could
> put its binaries there. But that might be very risky because GDAL ships a
> lot of DLLs that other apps might also use.

I agree -- and Tamas would never go for it! ;-)

>> I wonder what is donefor theones here:
>>
>> http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
>
> I have been meaning to look at that since you originally sent it.

let us now what you find -- I really can't spend any more time on this 
right now!

> Rgdal is one example where someone has statically
> linked GDAL into their own project.

so we know it can be done -- but with all the third party libs (xerces, 
etc, etc) that could be ugly/impossible.

>> could all that be done with some ctypes calls, rather than another
>> extension?
>
> Yes I believe you are absolutely right. I always forget about ctypes because
> I'm working on something that must be compatible back to Python 2.4 and
> ctypes was not included in 2.4.

I've never actually used it, but it does seem made for this sort of thing.

As for versions, I don't know if GDAL has a policy about what versions 
to support, but I'd think we could dump 2.4 (and maybe even 2.5...), and 
that means only one MS compiler to support.

Thanks for your work on this,

-Chris




-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

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