[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 07/27/2023 due to vacation conflicts. Maintainers instead provided text updates which I am relaying as our monthly report.

Fundraising update
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Obtaining sponsorship renewals has been challenging. One gold sponsor and two bronze level sponsors have declined to renew their sponsorship for 2023-2024. This will take away $70,000 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.

Maintenance activities update
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* Dan continued enhancement and usability refinement of the Python bindings to allow using dictionaries to pass options, added a GetConfigOptions to report a dictionary of currently applicable options, and fixed a bug in gdal.config_option's context manager that caused options to persist after exit in rare cases.

* Dan continued the effort to document undocumented configuration options

* Dan began modifying GDAL's test suite so tests can run independently in any order. This effort is a heavy lift that will ultimately touch just about every file in the test suite. Dan is taking the opportunity to clean up old syntax and usages while hardening them.

* Alessandro created regression tests for OGCAPI drivers and processed bugs which became apparent as a result of writing these tests. 

* Alessandro completed PR reviews for Even and started development of API subsdataset information manipulation.

* Even processed ~80 items of bug fixes, PR reviews, and issue tracker triaging. An area of emphasis was review and support of a PR from Barry DeZonia to make the multidimensional API usable from the Java bindings

* Even merged gdal_footprint, which is available in the Docker -latest images and will be released in the upcoming GDAL 3.8.0 major release.

* Even coordinated the release of GDAL 3.7.1. Release notes can be found at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.7.1/NEWS.md

* Even coordinated updating PROJ to the latest EPSG 10.093 database release. 

* A coverage CI configuration now runs line coverage testing of pull requests and push to master. It is documented at https://gdal.org/development/testing.html#test-coverage-reports 

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 08/24/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard