[gdal-dev] [EXT] GDAL sponsored maintenance report: Aug 2021-March 2023

Mon Mar 27 11:33:00 PDT 2023

Thank you Even,

I appreciate this view and corresponding insight into the work of the GDAL sponsored maintenance - this is in addition to the actual work you've undertaken, and coaching of occasional contributors and question askers like myself! I hope that in course of time the bug fixing ratio drops somewhat lower than half, and you get to enjoy building more enhancements and new things.

Best,

Matt
Geomatics Developer and Administrator | Environment | T 867-667-8133 | Yukon.ca
Hours: 08:30-16:30, Mon-Wed: Office, Thu: Remote, Fri: Away.

From: gdal-dev <gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of Even Rouault
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2023 9:35 AM
To: gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [EXT] [gdal-dev] GDAL sponsored maintenance report: Aug 2021-March 2023

Hi,

After more than one year and a half of benefiting from the GDAL sponsored maintenance program, it is time to share with the community what work has been accomplished thanks to that sponsorship.  It is quite hard to summarize, as the amount of tasks reaches 1800 for a total of 1313 hours. So lots of small tasks that make the daily reality of maintaining a project like GDAL.

Their global repartition is the following one:

  *   Bug fixing: 51% of actions, 55% of time spent (including 177 bug fixes related to issues found by oss-fuzz)
  *   Enhancements: 5% of actions, 15% of time spent
  *   CMake related work: 5% of actions, 10% of time spent
  *   Review of contributions: 20% of actions, 5% of time spent
  *   Release management: 2% of actions, 4% of time spent
  *   Bug triaging and analysis (without corresponding bug fix): 8% of actions, 3% of time spent
  *   Maintenance of continuous integration setup: 3% of actions and time spent
  *   Code enhancements/cleanups: 2% of actions and time spent
  *   Documentation: 1% of actions and time spent
  *   Other activities: mailing list discussions, bug reports to other projects, meetings, etc.

This work has benefited mostly to GDAL (80%), PROJ (15%), libtiff (2%), openjpeg (1%) and more marginally to other projects associated with GDAL such as Xerces-C, poppler, libgeotiff, cppcheck, netcdf, curl, libjxl and shapelib.

The CMake related work has been a major item of work for the mid 2021 - beginning of 2022 period. I cannot overstate the importance of the initial contribution of this work made by Hiroshi Miura who brought most of the initial material. That said, without the sponsored maintenance program which helped polishing and making it production ready for all environments supported by GDAL, this would likely have remained a out-of-tree project. I believe most stakeholders (contributors and users, at least the ones who build from source) are very satisfied with this transition from the historic build systems to a unified and more modern one, with consistent option naming. Building on Windows is in particular much easier nowadays, in particular when leveraging dependencies from distributions like vcpkg or Conda Forge. For GDAL developers, the new build system offers integration with IDEs and solves long standing annoyances like missing header dependency rules for partial rebuilds.

Although it doesn't show up particularly in the above statistics, making sure that the continuous integration configurations remain "green" at all times is a constant source of attention. Given the number of environments tested and the number of dependencies of GDAL, there is hardly a week where some action is not needed in that area to make sure that the code builds and compiles cleanly, tests pass, etc. We can now track a few rolling distributions to detect as early as possible sources of incompatibilities with our dependencies, and act early: report issues to upstream if there are bugs, or do changes in our code & build scripts to take them into account.

Making sure that code contributions from others are reviewed in a timely manner is important for the contributor experience. The average delay for a submitted pull request (excluding mine) to be commented by me (or merged if no comment needed) is 22 hours, and the median time 3h20 (statistics gathered on 601 pull requests since August 2021, source script at https://gist.github.com/rouault/0fbd37f59b8e93ae63761468a5600262<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Frouault%2F0fbd37f59b8e93ae63761468a5600262&data=05%7C01%7Cmatt.wilkie%40yukon.ca%7Ce886aa1296084d66bf1d08db2ee14820%7C98f515313973490abb70195aa264a2bc%7C0%7C0%7C638155317337928222%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=IA3VA815KMuovomwajlx062DQyDrBkXu%2FRtrclmJCfg%3D&reserved=0>)

In the category of regular tasks, one can also mention: updating the EPSG dataset in PROJ (and coordinating with IOGP when detecting issues), refreshing vendored of copies in the GDAL source tree (libtiff typically), making sure that new SQLite releases play nicely with PROJ which has some stressing SQL queries (we spot recently a performance regression in SQLite 3.41.0 and reported it to upstream)

The following RFCs have been implemented (not mentioning a few procedural ones) thanks to the sponsorship:

  *   RFC 87: Signed int8 data type for raster<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdal.org%2Fdevelopment%2Frfc%2Frfc87_signed_int8.html&data=05%7C01%7Cmatt.wilkie%40yukon.ca%7Ce886aa1296084d66bf1d08db2ee14820%7C98f515313973490abb70195aa264a2bc%7C0%7C0%7C638155317337928222%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=x5777yqaTDpQ%2FUElQi%2FZmyrxNybQ%2BaeuDzl2%2B95whHQ%3D&reserved=0>
  *   RFC 88: Use GoogleTest framework for C/C++ unit tests<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdal.org%2Fdevelopment%2Frfc%2Frfc88_googletest.html&data=05%7C01%7Cmatt.wilkie%40yukon.ca%7Ce886aa1296084d66bf1d08db2ee14820%7C98f515313973490abb70195aa264a2bc%7C0%7C0%7C638155317337928222%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=3oAFB8Ps12CWXFGKUdxpkeWjrTjJBczDt%2BVCLC6KqZA%3D&reserved=0>
  *   RFC 90: Direct access to compressed raster data<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdal.org%2Fdevelopment%2Frfc%2Frfc90_read_compressed_data.html&data=05%7C01%7Cmatt.wilkie%40yukon.ca%7Ce886aa1296084d66bf1d08db2ee14820%7C98f515313973490abb70195aa264a2bc%7C0%7C0%7C638155317337928222%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Lo12z9Gr4FAq9ipDlR5XdmS0ZA68t48lxrXQXieP4OM%3D&reserved=0>
  *   RFC 91: GDALDataset::Close() method<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdal.org%2Fdevelopment%2Frfc%2Frfc91_dataset_close.html&data=05%7C01%7Cmatt.wilkie%40yukon.ca%7Ce886aa1296084d66bf1d08db2ee14820%7C98f515313973490abb70195aa264a2bc%7C0%7C0%7C638155317337928222%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Fe7QgA1nYZzdVfqd4G%2B%2FTy1QJ9zl6fNZ1wPWmT%2FtZMU%3D&reserved=0>
  *   RFC 93: OGRLayer::UpdateFeature() method<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdal.org%2Fdevelopment%2Frfc%2Frfc93_update_feature.html&data=05%7C01%7Cmatt.wilkie%40yukon.ca%7Ce886aa1296084d66bf1d08db2ee14820%7C98f515313973490abb70195aa264a2bc%7C0%7C0%7C638155317337928222%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=KZ80gxWjlmA%2Fy1z2hIvkHQ%2BiJa%2FGuZW9vNtO8vJhRYY%3D&reserved=0>

Other recent significant work includes enhancements in Python exception handling (in preparation for enabling them by default in a future 4.0 release), and enabling them in the regression test suite and utilities.

The following feature releases have been issued: 3.4.0, 3.5.0 and 3.6.0. And the following bug fixes releases: 3.3.2, 3.3.3, 3.4.1, 3.4.2, 3.4.3, 3.5.1, 3.5.2, 3.6.1, 3.6.2 and 3.6.3

Best regards,

Even

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My software is free, but my time generally not.
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