[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 10/26/2023 due to vacation and FOSS4GNA conflicts. Maintainers instead provided text updates which I am relaying as our monthly report.

Fundraising update
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FrontierSI has declined to renew its Bronze sponsorship. More renewal traffic is expected in the next few months as we work to finish this year's cycle.

OSGeo Community Sprint
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Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Jukka Rahkonen, and Dan Baston are currently signed up to attend the OSGeo Community Sprint next week in Vienna https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Community_Sprint_2023 GDAL PSC members can obtain travel grants through the sponsorship program if they wish to attend (contact me for info).
 
Maintenance activities update
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Status from Dan:

> * Fixed a bug in /vsimem that was causing some tests to not clean up after themselves. 
> * Fixed more Python bindings crashes as a result of test execution independence effort.

Status from Alessandro:

> This month I reviewed a few PRs (mainly from Even):
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8534
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8531
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8529
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8526
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8521
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8519
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8518
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8516
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8495
> 
> Then I focused on investigating and fixing the following bugs:
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/8525 OpenCL always uses first
> device per platform on Mac
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/8523 Error in
> gdal.VectorTranslate for explodecollections=True + some weird python
> logging behaviour
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/8522 OAPIF: Increase the default page size
> 
> Lastly, starting from a QGIS upstream issue
> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/54966 I worked on the GDAL side of
> the problem and wrote a test https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8609,
> while investigating the issue I discovered another issue which was
> eventually fixed by Even with https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8582

Status from Even:

> - Regeneration of GDAL 3.7.2 Docker images for WebP and curl recent CVEs
> - Add OGRLayer::WriteArrowBatch() functionality which is the write-side of RFC86, with a generic implementation for all drivers and specialized implementations for Arrow/Parquet:https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8517- and use it in ogr2ogr when possible, that is when the source layer declares OLCFastGetArrowStream to give significant speed-ups (including for GeoPackage->GeoPackage): https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8544 +https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8560 . Note that is currently only enabled with a very restricted set of ogr2ogr options (mostly only -spat, -where and driver creation options)
> - Massive speed-up of GeoPackage spatial index creation. From 26 seconds down to 6 seconds on a 3.2 million feature table. https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8596 . Also available as a separate library that can be used by non-GDAL implementations (libspatialite for example)
> - Significant performance improvement of RasterIO() on VRT with VRTComplexSource that have only a <NODATA> element and data types Byte/UInt16/Int16: https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8562
> - CI: addition of (an embryo of) a performance regression test suite. Note that due to CI virtual machines being quite unpredictable performance-wise, it can only detect regressions > 20%. https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8538
> - and ~50 other activities: bug fixes, pull request reviews


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 11/23/2023 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard