[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Michael Sumner, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 12/19/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Sponsorship Activity
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* Sparkgeo has renewed for 2024 as a Bronze sponsor. Thanks again Sparkgeo for your organization's continued sustaining support of the GDAL Maintenance Program!

Project News
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The GDAL Sponsorship Program has engaged with the maintainer of the Breathe project https://github.com/breathe-doc/breathe/ to support maintenance work in the form of a small grant. Besides GDAL, a number of C++ projects use Breathe to integrate Doxygen output with the Sphinx documentation system, but its releases have not kept up with changes in both. The grant is intended to bring its maintenance current. See https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2024-December/059899.html for more details.

Maintenance activities update
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Alessandro

* Contract renewal and bureaucratic challenges
* OGR SQL schema implementation
* GDALDriverHasOpenOption to allow drivers to advertise options. This is needed to support convenient usage of the OGR SQL schema overrides via applications like ogr2ogr


Dan

* New NASA contract now in place
* Published user survey results at https://gdal.org/en/stable/community/user_survey_2024.html 
* Tuning and documenting of the new VRT expression capabilities. Vendoring the exprtk library may add too much code to GDAL (increasing .so size by several megabytes). Currently looking at alternatives
* Documentation improvements to gdalwarp and gdalbuildvrt

Even

* RFC 104 – the 'gdal` command https://gdal.org/en/latest/development/rfc/rfc104_gdal_cli.html is now available in master and ready for testing. Multiple major releases will need to go by before its interface and usage are fixed in regards to backward compatibility. It needs extensive testing and usage, and we look to the community who asked for it in the user survey to come forward to shape its future.
* Activity in 60+ ticket and PRs
* OpenJPEG 2.5.3 release support to include Tile Length Markers for optimized decoding
* Added DuckDB spatial support when libduckdb is available.
* A "native thread safe driver" based on libertiff that is almost entirely free of libtiff and libgeotiff but currently defers to them when necessary. It is read only, bypasses the GDAL tile cache, and uses a single FILE* for data access. Here be dragons, but applications looking for high throughput TIFF support can use it for performant parallel read access. 
* Follow-on discussion about libertiff driver usage in PROJ, which provides the possibility of removing PROJ's current libtiff dependency entirely. See https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2024-December/059951.html to join in the discussion on the topic.

Michael

* Discussion about Zarr implementation from GDAL's perspective and the need for a true native Zarr library to support application usage from GDAL and others.

Javier

* No updates.


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 01/23/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard