[gdal-dev] Small meshing utility

[Tim Keitt]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Tim Keitt <tkeitt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> cool! though I"m a little confused as to how this fits with OGR.
>>
>> OGR is used for i/o.
>>
>
> I see -- so you've written something like the triangle command line
> utility, but with OGR for IO, so you don't need to use triangles
> particular data file format? sounds useful.
>
>>> Also -- how did you deal with the fact that triangle calls the system
>>> exit() function on error -- that could bring down whatever your host
>>> process is.
>>
>> Its a simple command line utility. Not much harm done if it calls exit.
>
> I see -- I was thinking you'd extended the OGR library, rather than
> the OGR command line tools. I get it now.
>
>>> We've written a wrapper around triangle for Python (anyone feel free
>>> to send me a note if you're interested), and we ended up handling that
>>> by spawning another process to run triangle in -- but that has
>>> performance issues (copying data around) which would be nice to avoid.
>>
>> I don't call triangle, I pass arguments to the C-level API.
>
> neither do we -- we also use the C-API -- but if you need to run it in
> another process you need to ass the data around somehow -- and if you
> want to call it as a library from a longer-running application, then
> the calls to exit() will kill you (well, kill your app...) if you
> don't run it in another process.
>
>>> If only triangle has a nicer licensing scheme -- it really is a nice utility.
>>
>> Only prohibition is you can't sell it without a license.
>
> well, "commercial" is not clearly defined in the license -- why not
> just GPL the darn thing!
>
> and it's not BSD-compatible in any case.

I don't have any plans to sell software that includes triangle, so I'm
not concerned. We don't distribute it either with our code, so that is
not a problem. You could probably sell software that required the user
to build triangle and be perfectly legit if you were so inclined. I
don't think what is written on the triangle web site is really
enforceable unless you distributed the triangle code or compiled
library with your software. The author's wishes mean that triangle
will likely remain stand-alone and not incorporated into FOSS
projects, but that is perfectly fine for my uses of the library.

THK


>
> -Chris
>
>
>
> --
>
> Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
> Oceanographer
>
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>
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-- 
Timothy H. Keitt
http://www.keittlab.org/