[gdal-dev] GDAL 2.5.0 beta1 available

[Even Rouault]

Greg,

> I would expect then that packaging systems will hold off on this,
> because I don't think we've reached the point that the collateral damage
> of upgrading proj to 6 is ok.

Packaging systems with an experimental staging area should be able to package 
it hopefully, and add it to the other packages supporting PROJ 6 already.

> 
> With any luck I'm wrong and most of the proj-using packages have had a
> release that works on 6, but it seems that there are a lot of packages
> not yet able to cope.

I understand your concern, but what would have be supposed to do: wait for 
others to upgrade to PROJ 6 as well and defer until they did :-) ?
We're tracing the road away by adopting PROJ 6 too. Projects which don't 
follow the trend are doomed to be left aside ultimately.

Sorry, supporting older PROJ versions wasn't really wishable from a GDAL 
maintainability point of view. What happened is a deep change. A lot of code 
has been """moved"""" to PROJ: instanciation of CRS from the EPSG database, 
WKT1 support, ESRI WKT support and PROJ string import/export. Actually, all 
that code has been deleted from GDAL and rewritten in a completely different 
way in PROJ. Supporting older PROJ versions in GDAL 2.5 would mean maintaining 
a lot of ancient code, that behaves in subtle different ways. Would be a mess 
to have the test suite working in both mode, etc. GDAL is a complicated and 
big enough beast like it is already.

Even

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