[gdal-dev] Documenting build requirements (e.g. ODBC)

[Even Rouault]

On lundi 30 septembre 2019 14:07:44 CEST Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Sep 2019 at 12:33, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> 
wrote:
> > On lundi 30 septembre 2019 11:21:16 CEST Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> > > I'm a bit lost where build requirements are supposed
> > > to be documented now. They used to be described
> > > on the Wiki, e.g. https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/BuildingOnUnix
> > > or driver-specific ones https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ECW
> > 
> > Open question. We should probably have one or several pages on the website
> > with build instructions. And for driver specific things, move them in the
> > page of the driver
> 
> I think a simple yet clean convention could be that each driver that
> has any build requirements receives extra section(s):
> 
> "Building" section with "Unix" and "Windows" subsections
> where requirements are explained
> 
> as last sections of driver's page.
> Comments?

Sounds good. But for example multiple drivers depend on the same library 
(let's say sqlite3, expat, etc.), so we don't want to repeat how to enable 
that library for each driver (so links to some common description would be 
preferable then). There's also the issue that for unix, the name of the 
packages depend on the OS or the particular distro, or the distro version, so 
we cannot document everything.

I'd say that we should at the very minimum recover the information that used 
to be in the "Compiled by default" column of
https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/release/3.0/gdal/frmts/formats_list.html

That would address the comments in 
https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/1715
https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/1204

-- 
Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
http://www.spatialys.com