[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, and Dan Baston held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 06/22/2023. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

* Dan discussed recent updates to update the GDAL bindings to more closely keep track of usage reference counting so that it is more difficult to crash when using objects in the bindings. He decide it would be more productive to attempt to address some of the gotchas that are outlined in https://gdal.org/api/python_gotchas.html instead of updating the document with more explicit workarounds for gotchas.

* Dan continued update of GDAL's test suite to migrate to pytest, including efforts to provide test ordering independence, explicit definition of test fixtures, and modernizing python usage.

* As mentioned last month, Dan had undertaken documentation effort to identify and autoformat GDAL's configurations. That effort is now merged to the tree and available on the website at https://gdal.org/user/configoptions.html#list-of-configuration-options-and-where-they-apply 

* Even coordinated the libtiff 4.5.1 release. While there is some agreement on deprecating the libtiff utility programs that continue to attract security attention but not contribution, no decision has been made to initiate their deprecation in an upcoming release.

* Even added CI linting to trigger an error if a GDAL configuration option is added but it is not documented using the formalized formatting or marked hidden.

* Even provided an initial implementation of gdal_footprint, which can be used to compute a polygon describing where pixels are filled. It includes features to operate on existing mask bands - either explicit or implicit, reproject polygons, operate on overviews, and defining geometry properties like densification or number of points. Go checkout  https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/7992 to play with it and see https://github.com/rouault/gdal/blob/gdal_footprint/doc/source/programs/gdal_footprint.rst for options and usage.

* Even implemented a new algorithm for nearblack's flood fill algorithm https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/7877 which should produce better capture of concave shapes. It is not the default algorithm and must be explicitly selected as it takes a bit more computing. 

* Even explored adding a line coverage CI item, but it is still in the experimental stage.

* Allesandro reported via email that he had been working OGCAPI tickets #7679 and #7926 in an attempt to clean up CI test failures


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 07/27/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard