[gdal-dev] NITF DESDATA

[matt.nottingham at zen.co.uk]

Hi,

I'm trying to access the DESDATA segment of a nitf file. Nothing
appears to happen in the default build - i.e. getmetadata("DES") (or
getmetadata("NITF_DES")) doesn't return anything. Looking at the NITF
driver I can see it has all of the code necessary to read the DES part
of nitf files, but its all protected by a #ifdef ESRI_BUILD. If I
bodge the fmts/nitf/gnumakefile (I'm on FC16) to have a -DESRI_BUILD
in the CFLAG variable then it all works as expected. So my questions
are:

1) Have I missed something stupid and desdata can be read by a default
build? (I'm using gdal 1.9.0)

2) Why doesn't the default build of gdal read desdata? (It seems odd
to have all the code then not use it - there must be a good reason for
that).

3) What is the ESRI_BUILD flag? I can't find any docs on it - its not
clear which option(s) set it.

Sadly Google has failed me on the above - I can see people *are*
reading it (http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/4803), so why can't I!


Thanks very much,

Matt