[gdal-dev] spatialite on Debian: neither lwgeom nor rttopo

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 02/18/2018 11:18 PM, Tobias Wendorff wrote:
> Did anyone recognize that stable and unstable Debian neither builds
> lwgeom nor rttopo in libspatialite by default?

lwgeom support was disabled to untangle the circular dependency as
documented in the spatialite changelog:

 - Drop build dependency on liblwgeom-dev to untangle
   spatialite->postgis->gdal->spatialite circular dependency.

rttopo support will be available in the next spatialite release, but
it's taking forever to get past 4.4.0-rc1.

There will most likely never be a 4.4.0 final release, and I've also
heard talk about skipping 4.5.0 in favor of going for 5.0.0 instead.

As long as there is no rttopo support in the released spatialite, the
Debian package will not enable the support.

The rttopo 1.1.0 final release also hasn't been published yet, this is
all still work in process in preparation of proper topo support in
spatialite.

> This means: no ST-functions using SQLite dialect.
> 
> For lwgeom it might be disabled due to licensing problems. spatialite's
> support for rttopo might be unstable, so this is for homebrew only.
> But nobody can test it, since it's also disabled by default.

There is no license problem, there is a dependency problem.

> If you manually enable lwgeom in the Debian sources and rebuild the
> package, everything works as expected... Didn't try for rttopo, but
> should behave equal.

Your system will fail to do distribution upgrades to newer stable
releases. Even updating your systems to get the newer postgis or gdal
packages will fail (assuming your on testing/unstable).

You're very much on your own if you choose to re-instate the circular
dependency. As they say: when it breaks you get to keep the pieces.

Kind Regards,

Bas