[gdal-dev] Considering drivers removal ?

[Nyall Dawson]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2021 at 09:50, Jan Heckman <jan.heckman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A bit of googling sometimes gives an indication. I was a little confused about SVG, not using it myself but getting quite a few references.
> E.g. this one in stackexchange, with a mention how often it was looked up:
> https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/11476/importing-svg-into-gis
> Just an idea. Obviously, it is not easy to decide exactly what to do with this sort of information.

I've previously found the SVG driver useful for getting data out of
typically non-spatial formats for georeferencing (e.g. I once had to
convert a bunch of spatial data which had been hand drawn in visio on
top of a google map screenshot...). I'd be sorry to see this driver
go, as it's a useful last-resort aid for situations like this.

Nyall

> Jan
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 12:02 AM Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> It's not spring yet, but I'm in a mood lately of axing useless things, and we
>> probably have tons of candidate for that in GDAL, especially in drivers.
>> I was going to just axe the DB2 driver
>> (https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/3366) but the issue is more general.
>>
>> Any idea how we can know what is used and what isn't ? A "call-home"
>> functionality where we would track driver usage would only be acceptable if
>> people enable it and have network connectivity, so we won't probably get lots
>> of feedback. Having a spreadsheet with the driver list and asking people to
>> fill it would probably also receive little feedback. So the idea I had was to
>> do something like the following in the Open() method of a candidate for
>> removal:
>>
>> GDALDataset* FooDriver::Open( .... )
>> {
>>    if( !Identify(poOpenInfo) )
>>       return nullptr;
>>
>>    if( !CPLTestBool(CPLGetConfigOption("GDAL_ENABLE_DRIVER_FOO", "NO") )
>>    {
>>        CPLError(CE_Failure, CPLE_AppDefined,
>>     "Driver FOO is considered for removal in GDAL 3.5. You are invited "
>>     "to convert any dataset in that format to another more common one ."
>>     "If you need this driver in future GDAL versions, create a ticket at "
>>     "https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal (look first for an existing one first) to "
>>     "explain how critical it is for you (but the GDAL project may still "
>>     "remove it), and to enable it now, set the GDAL_ENABLE_DRIVER_FOO "
>>     "configuration option / environment variable to YES");
>>        return nullptr;
>>     }
>>     ...
>> }
>>
>> That is, when we detect a file to be handled by the driver, emit the above
>> error message and do not open the dataset, unless the user defines the
>> environment variable.
>> Similarly in the Create()/CreateCopy() methods.
>> If we ship this in 3.3, with a 3.5 milestone for removal, this would offer a
>> feedback period of one year / 2 feature versions.
>>
>> Here's my own list of candidates for retirement (probably over-conservative).
>> Mostly based on gut feeling. None of them are particularly bad citizens, but I
>> have no indication that they are still used, which doesn't mean they aren't.
>>
>> * Raster side:
>> BPG
>> DB2Raster
>> DOQ1
>> DOQ2
>> E00GRID
>> Epsilon
>> FujiBAS
>> GS7BG
>> GSAG
>> IDA
>> JDEM
>> JPEG2000 (Jasper): JP2OpenJPEG is a better replacement
>> JPEGLS
>> LAN
>> MFF
>> MG4Lidar ?
>> NDF
>> NTv1
>> SDTS Raster
>> SGI
>> XPM
>> ZMap
>>
>> * Vector side:
>> AERONAVFAA
>> ESRI ArcObjects
>> ARCGEN
>> BNA
>> Cloudant
>> CouchDB
>> DB2
>> DODS
>> FMEObjects Gateway
>> Geomedia MDB
>> GMT ASCII Vectors
>> GTM
>> HTF
>> INGRES
>> MongoDB (the old one, superseded by MongoDBv3)
>> OpenAIR
>> REC
>> SDTS
>> SUA
>> SVG
>> TIGER
>> WALK
>>
>>
>> Anything you'd add / remove ?
>>
>> What is not obvious is what would be the criterion for keeping a driver: 1,
>> 10, 100 users asking for the driver to be kept ?
>> If a GDAL developer contributing to the overall good of the project needs the
>> preservation of a driver to be able to justify its continued involvement, I'd
>> tend to think it to be enough to keep it.
>>
>>
>> Even
>>
>> --
>> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
>> http://www.spatialys.com
>> _______________________________________________
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>> gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
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>
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