[gdal-dev] How to know which formats allow editing with ogrinfo?

[Rahkonen Jukka (MML)]

Hi,

Two most often needed items from the old format list for me as a community helper were "Creation" to answer "Why gdalwarp to format x fails" and "Compiled by default" to answer "Why everything with my GDAL to format x fails". The list was useful.

-Jukka- 

-----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
Lähettäjä: Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> 
Lähetetty: perjantai 15. marraskuuta 2019 19.55
Vastaanottaja: eadam at co.lincoln.or.us
Kopio: gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org; Rahkonen Jukka (MML) <jukka.rahkonen at maanmittauslaitos.fi>
Aihe: Re: [gdal-dev] How to know which formats allow editing with ogrinfo?

> Can this be partly inferred from driver pages with the presence (or
> absence) of items?  For instance,
> https://gdal.org/drivers/vector/gml.html#driver-capabilities

Not really. They are only high level capabilities. Vector editing capabilities are not reported in driver pages

> The old driver pages
> (https://web.archive.org/web/20190211030817/https://www.gdal.org/ogr_f
> ormats
> .html) were tables that very effectively conveyed the capabilities (or
> limitations) of the drivers and allowed for scanning for drivers that 
> had the capabilities that you wanted.

The information in individual pages is roughly the same as in the global table.

> Would a similar table be possible or desirable?

A few people have indeed noted the absence of the table. Not sure if this is usual "resistance to change" phenomenon or if there is there really a strong use case for "I don't want which format to use: let's look at the summary page to select one". 

If so, then yes if someone contributes it, that'd be welcome. However I think we'd want it to be generated from a Python script from the individual .rst pages, by parsing the directives like ".. supports_create::" that are in those .rst files. That way that would make maintainance of the summary easier (and initial version less tidious that doing that manually)

> There are a few things that might be missing.  The new page has 
> https://gdal.org/programs/raster_common_options.html#raster-common-opt
> ions
> and
> https://gdal.org/programs/vector_common_options.html#vector-common-opt
> ions I wonder if a list of uncommon options like this would be 
> helpful, https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ConfigOptions?

Migrating the wiki page to the doc could be useful. My own opinion is that driver specific configuration options should be documented in the driver specific page, rather than in a global config option page. Same with /vsi specific options that should go to https://gdal.org/user/virtual_file_systems.html if not already there. 

Or if a global list is needed, I'd say a bit the same as for driver summaries, have a way to compile the list of options from .rst files where they would be mention and link from the summary to the actual page. But we don't have currently any explicit directive for configuration options.

> I was also curious to see if the OSGeo technical writing project would 
> impact any of the documentation.

There was initial discussion but no follow-up as far as GDAL is concerned.

Even

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