[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, and Alessandro Pasotti canceled the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting that was to be held on 12/28/2023 due to holiday conflicts. Maintainers instead provided text updates which I am relaying as our monthly report.

Fundraising update
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Annual renewals are now going out to sponsors, so if you are a coordinator of GDAL funding in your organization, please be on the lookout for them. 

Maintenance activities update
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Status from Dan:

> No activity from me this month. I hope you're enjoying your holidays.

Status from Alessandro:

> Bugfix: SubdatasetInfo API: better check for drive letters
> Feature: https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/8570Add OGRLayer::GetExtent3D()
> PR Review https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8928ogrinfo: add a -extent3D switch
> Feature:  PG: GetExtent3D fast implementation
> PR Review https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/9003 VSICurl and derived:
> replace most uses of CPLString with std::sring
> PR Review https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8988 WMS: change logic to
> set gdalwmscache directory to honor in particular XDG_CACHE_HOME
> (fixes #8987)

Status from Even:

> - Release of GDAL 3.8.1 after 3 release candidates
> - Release of GDAL 3.8.2
> - and because of a new 3.8.0 regression that has been reported and now fixed, I plan to do a 3.8.3 next week
> - RFC98 "Build requirements for GDAL 3.9" has been voted and implemented. This brings a significant cleanup with 8300 lines (mostly cmake compatibility scripts) removed, including more than 300 #ifdef branches removed
> - Attempt at being nicer with respect to numpy dependency by providing a pyproject.toml file per https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8926 . More ambitious changes removing deprecated uses of setuptools will probably have to wait for a potential GDAL 4.0
> - Shapelib 1.6.0 has been released
> - a pre-RFC about the removal of a subset of the vendored libraries (namely zlib, libjpeg, libpng, giflib, liblerc) has been discussed on the mailing list. Checking further, I've realized that Debian unstable still ships with jpegturbo < 3.0, and thus has not yet 12-bit JPEG support. I've filed an issue about that to the libjpegturbo Debian package. I also see that Fedora Rawhide still ships libjpegturbo < 3.0 (it would be good that someone more familiar with that part of the ecosystem brings that to the attention of the maintainer of the package). So for now I'm deferring the RFC and its implementation to having more widespread use of libjpegturbo 3.0 to avoid functional loses.

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 01/25/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard