[gdal-dev] Call for discussion on RFC 59 (v2): GDAL/OGR utilities as a library

Frank Warmerdam warmerdam at pobox.com
Wed Aug 26 18:26:39 PDT 2015


Even / Faza,

I clearly should have been commenting sooner.

I am concerned that having messy structures of options for each
program is going to complicate maintaining the actually commandline
programs, and that it will still be a fragile and complicated point of
entry as commandline arguments evolve over time.

I'd prefer if the approach had just been to embed the main()'s in a
library and to still pass the exact same vector of arguments (in the
char **argv format) to these functions instead of shelling out a
program.

I'd also have (as usual) preferred this to be embedded in libgdal.so
so there weren't additional library layers to keep track of.  We are
clearly a "kitchen sink" style library - lets own that. :-)

I would love to be able to replace many places where I shell out to
run gdal command line programs with a library call with essentially
the same arguments.

PS. One benefit of built-in "programs" is that I can do things like
invoke gdal_translate on an in memory data by using the right name for
it since it is in the same process space.  Lack of that has frequently
frustrated me.  It would also mean you could register new formats
without having deploy plugin .so's, or register VRT plugin functions
more easily.

Best regards,
Frank


On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Even Rouault
<even.rouault at spatialys.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Summer of code 2015 being finished now, Faza's work now include librarification
> of gdalinfo, gdal_translate, gdalwarp and ogr2ogr. Faza will continue working
> on some other utilities.
>
> We'd be happy to hear about your comments, especially on the API. So speak now
> please.
>
> The overview of the work is there:
> https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc59_utilities_as_a_library
>
> I'd like to call for a vote soon as I'd want that to be merged as soon as
> possible, so it gets more widely tested and to avoid increasing merge
> difficulties.
>
> Even
>
> --
> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
> http://www.spatialys.com
> _______________________________________________
> gdal-dev mailing list
> gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer


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