[gdal-dev] Patch submission & development questions

[Even Rouault]

Selon Dan Homerick <danhomerick at gmail.com>:

> Gdal-dev,
>
> I have a couple questions about the patch submission process. The main
> one being, "What is it?" I assume that patches are best submitted
> through a Trac ticket. Should we post here for discussion before
> opening a ticket, if the issue we'd like to patch doesn't have an
> existing ticket open?

Yes, that might be useful to make a notice here so that the patch gets attention
more easily.

> Do most changes go through an "official" RFC
> phase, or just the addition of larger features?

RFC are generally used for the addition of new API to GDAL/OGR, or big changes
in subsystems. Changes in drivers that keep the API can be done without formal
RFC

>
> There are a couple things I'd like to submit patches for. The first
> addresses a question I had earlier about the OGR MS SQL Sever
> (mssqlspatial), and its default tendency to assume that any "image"
> column must be a WKB geometry column. Since the expected geometry
> storage type is specified in the connection string (i.e. native, wkb,
> or wkt, defaulting to native), the patch utilizes that type
> information when auto-selecting the geometry column. Like the original
> code, the patch does not try to guess which is the geometry column
> when WKT is used.

You might want to discuss that with Tamas Szerekes, the author of the driver.

>
> The other thing I'd like to submit a patch for is the Visual Studio
> 2010 solution / project file. Before I do any work on it, I'd like to
> know more about how it's maintained, though. Specifically, is it
> something that is intended to be auto-generated periodically (either
> directly, or by converting a 2008 project), or is it being maintained
> by hand? The main changes I'd want to make are adding all the missing
> source and header files, adding header paths, and any other tweaks
> required to get Intellisense to work correctly.

There's makegdal_gen.bat that is used from time to time to regenerate the MSVC
project files. I suppose we should run it before release, but I don't see it
mentionned in HOWTO-RELEASE

>
> A final question I have is, "What is the testing process?" As part of
> my work, I'll be (indirectly) writing tests for the patch(es) I
> submit, but I'll be writing those tests with an eye towards how we'll
> be using the classes. If GDAL has a more formal testing procedure,
> I'll be happy to write additional tests for whatever testing framework
> is being used.

We have a regression test suite here : http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/trunk/autotest/

You need to build the GDAL python bindings to be able to run it.

>
> Cheers,
>  - Dan
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