[gdal-dev] Considering drivers removal ?

[Andrew C Aitchison]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2021, Even Rouault wrote:

> 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.
            ...            ... 
> 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.

That sounds a reasonable timetable.

The next Ubuntu LTS is due for release April 2022, so is likely to have
GDAL 3.4 and the avoidable warning, which is good. (If it had GDAL 3.5
people moving to it from a previous LTS would not see the warning ...)

Where are the costs in keeping these drivers ?
If as Kurt describes, the costs are for the user, we already have plugins
and options to not include drivers in the main binary. We could add a 3 way
switch like the kernel: builtin/plugin/not built which would make things
simple for packagers and users.

I am assuming that these are drivers that don't get much maintenance
at the moment, so the gain for GDAL developers is not having to add
new GDAL features to so many drivers ?

-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison					Kendal, UK
 			andrew at aitchison.me.uk