[gdal-dev] Importing completely MITAB into GDAL source tree ?

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

As some of you know, the OGR MapInfo driver heavily depends on the source code 
of the MITAB library. Over the years, people have contributed fixes and 
improvements through GDAL. Not all those changes have made their way in the 
official MITAB repository that sits at https://github.com/mapgears/mitab and 
which has not evolved a lot in comparison to its copy in OGR.
Maintaining 2 copies and synchronizing them is a time consuming and error-
prone process.
On the other hand, there are still people that depend on the standalone MITAB 
library, its utilities (tab2tab, etc...) and its dedicated C API. So I'm 
wondering if it wouldn't be more efficient to import those specific remaining 
parts (standalone build scripts, C API and utilities) into the GDAL source 
tree (probably a ogr/ogrsf_frmts/mitab/build and ogr/ogrsf_frmts/mitab/apps)
That way both projects would share the same code in a very obvious way, while 
keeping their specificities.

Thoughts ?

Even

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