[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, and Dan Baston held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 08/24/2023. Alessandro was unavailable due to vacation conflicts. 

Fundraising update
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Obtaining sponsorship renewals continues to be challenging. Another gold sponsor has dropped supporting GDAL. This brings us to two gold and two bronze level sponsors who have declined to renew their sponsorship for 2023-2024 [1]. This will take away $120,000 of sponsorship funding for the next year. If your corporate organization values the efforts of the GDAL sponsorship program and are willing to step forward to continue support of these activities, please contact me privately and I will be happy to route you through NumFOCUS to help us backfill the hole. If you are a customer of the companies who have dropped supporting GDAL, you might mention your frustration with that fact through your sales or other communication channels.

Maintenance activities update
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* Dan reports that NASA will be continuing to fund his maintenance efforts and activity level with the project for the next year. Thanks Dan and thanks NASA!

* Dan continued GDAL test refactoring and enhancement to allow tests to be run without ordering dependencies. The ultimate goal of this effort is to enable parallel execution of the test suite to shorten our CI execution times. Specific updates here include providing temppath fixtures for many tests and cleaning up collisions of /vsimem calls.

* Even reports slightly reduced bug and maintenance activity due to vacation season with about 10 tickets addressed.

* Even continued enhancement of parquet/arrow and GeoParquet. This included providing RowGroups and group statistics when writing content, nested parquet datatype support and parquet attribute filtering.

* Even added more epoch handling improvements in PROJ

* Alessandro worked to add a unified subdataset name APIs and align the driver-dependent versions of the same for GDAL. This is to make it easier to present and consume them in applications like QGIS.

* Howard, Dan, and Even had a discussion about GDAL's plugin system. This was continuation of discussion started at [2].

* A short discussion about incrementing GDAL's base C++ level to C++17 was ticketed https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/8270 please provide feedback if you have opinions about such an increment

* Dan discussed the potential of merging the capabilities of exactextract https://github.com/isciences/exactextract/ into GDAL's base algorithms for providing fast and accurate raster partial pixel polygon overlay statistics. 

* Even discussed the potential of aliasing GIntBig into standard ctypes int64_t. 

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 09/28/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard

[1] https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/commits/master/doc/source/sponsors/index.rst
[2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2023-May/057290.html