[gdal-dev] Re: Resquest for comments (RFC 36)

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Ivan Lucena <ivan.lucena <at> pmldnet.com> writes:

> 
> Hi All,
> 
> RFC 36: http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc36_open_by_drivername
> 
> The goal of RFC 36 is to save processing time by telling GDALOpen what driver
to use, avoiding the
> driver-probing mechanism (Where all drivers are asked to checked if they
recognize the file).

You can add to the motivation of RFC also the case when a file format is
supported by several drivers. I do not know if there are others than JPEG2000
but for that GDAL has JPEG2000, JP2KAK, JP2ECW, JP2MrSID and JP2OpenJPEG
drivers. If several drivers are configured the only way to control which one is
used is to use GDAL_SKIP. Being able to tell which driver to use instead of
which one(s) not to use feels much better for me.

I can easily imagine that someone making benchmark with different GDAL JPEG2000
drivers could get totally wrong results if the new driver:file opening system
for some reason fails and GDAL takes automatically the first capable JPEG2000
driver from the list without warning the user. Wouldn't it be better to throw an
error by default?

-Jukka Rahkonen-