[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, and Alessandro Pasotti held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 05/25/2023. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

* The recent OSGeo DNS attack demonstrated that GDAL's test infrastructure is sensitive, via usage of download.osgeo.org for test data, to single point of failure. It was unclear if there is backup copies of that test data suite anywhere, and it was resolved to create a GitHub-based repository to both mirror and version control the (larger) test suite data that GDAL uses for daily operations. That repository was created at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal-data and Dan and Even will coordinate moving content there and wiring up CI as convenient to utilize it.

* Dan continued development of Sphinx directives and documentation additions to systematically highlight, define, index, cross-link, and organize GDAL's "configuration options". Dan has updated and defined 1800! configuration options across all various types – creation, open, dataset creation, and layer. Thanks to this effort, users will be able to more clearly see and navigate how environmental variable options control GDAL's behavior. Documentation writers will be able to conveniently add specific information that will participate in indexes and linkages of those options to other relevant information. This effort should be merged and available on gdal.org within a week or two.

* Even discussed the need for a libtiff release due to outstanding CVEs and his desire to remove some of the poorly constructed libtiff utility applications that tend to be the cause of the CVE traffic. 

* Even discussed picking up the ticket for adding a "gdal_footprint" utility https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/6264 If you are interested or have ideas about needs or how it should work, please chime in on the ticket.

* Even coordinated the release of GDAL 3.7.0 on 05/10/2023. It included ~7 RFC implementations and a massive list of bug fixes, feature updates, and enhancements. Read more at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.7.0/NEWS.md

* Alessandro continued to provide review support on GDAL PRs and picked up a family of tickets related to MSSQL that had been stagnating for a while after QGIS users reported them too. After setting up a test environment, he was able to knock out a few related bugs that will be included in future release.

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 06/22/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard