[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Javier Jimenez Shaw, and OSGeo Treasurer Mike Smith held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 03/28/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Discussion Items
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* GDAL 3.9.0 RC1 is expected 06 MAY 2024, with the final release to follow. A NEWS entry listing all of its enhancements and bug fixes is available from https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/release/3.9/NEWS.md
* GDAL 3.10 is expected to be the release number after 3.9. A release named 4.0 is being tabled until there are enough major items to warrant it.
* The OGC CRS Standards Working Group has added a work item of constructing a CRSJSON definition. PROJJSON is being used as the starting point for that effort, although it is unclear if compatibility between them is to be a priority. Participate through your OGC channels if this topic is important to you. https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/proj/2024-April/011375.html 

Maintenance activities update
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Dan

* Python API documentation is complete. See https://gdal.org/api/index.html#python-api for live preview of its updates
* Random order testing now working except for one sticky issue with library load ordering
* Added Numpy masked array
* Updated to use os.pathlike where reasonable
* VSIFile* methods no longer crash on closed file handles
* Adjust ogr.DataSource and alias ogr.Dataset (Python bindings only)
* Future activities include, adding some developer guide updates, testing instructions, and investigation of expressing RAII tools such as smart pointers into C++ API 

Alessandro

* PR reviews
* Investigation of gdalwarp and VSI caching behavior
* Adapting the argparse https://github.com/p-ranav/argparse argument parser to more utilities. The new argument parsing code supports integrated help, translation possibilities, and long help in addition to standardizing how GDAL utilities behave in regards to consumption and expression of command line arguments.

Even

* Docker image updates including bumping osgeo/gdal base image to Ubuntu 24.04
* Preparation and verification of the GDAL bindings for Numpy 2.0 
* TileDB version bump
* GDAL 3.9 release preparation
* Release notes for GDAL 3.9 https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/release/3.9/NEWS.md
* GDAL 3.8.5 release 

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 05/23/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard