[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Michael Sumner, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 07/25/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Discussion Items
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* Esri has committed and been invoiced of three years of gold sponsorship of GDAL through the GDAL Sponsorship Program. Thanks again to Esri for its multi-year commitment! Sustained institutional support from organizations like Esri in the GDAL Sponsorship Program directly supports maintenance of GDAL continuous integration activity, ticket reviews, build system updates, bug fixing, and security fuzz testing.
* Discussion about modifying the current CHANGELOG layout of maintenance versus major releases
* Even and Javier discussed epsg.io <http://epsg.io/> with MapTiler folks at FOSS4GE Tartuu about improvements to update and eliminate mis-specified projection parameters for some coordinate systems.

Maintenance activities update
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Alessandro
* GDALArgument parser implementation for gdal_manage
* Remove fixed level option conflicted with -i and -e in gdal_contour
* Geopackage driver PR reviews and testing
* PR reviews
 
Dan

* ReadTheDocs configuration and deployment. It was tough to get the Python bindings building and loading as part of the documentation build setup on RTD
* robots.txt indexing configuration (thanks for suggestions from Rob Coup)
* web stats showing ~33k hits/day to gdal.org <http://gdal.org/> with 2600 unique clicks/day

Even

* 90+ PR, ticket, and review activities
* Reaction and investigation resulting of GitHub rolling a somewhat broken Windows SDK
* Additional STANDALONE driver build configurations in support of RFC 96 (Arrow, OpenJPEG, TileDB, Georaster, etc)
* Multithreading read support for VRT and gdalvrtindex (non-overlapping scenarios)
* Additional "simplified" RasterIO interface that sizes and fills a buffer to provide a convenient alternative invocation
 
Javier

* Point interpolation method improvements https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/10506

Michel

* gdalraster bindings in R bringin VSI and expanded capability to R
* discussion about kerchunk and GDAL

Howard

* I'll see you at FOSS4GNA in September where I will be presenting about the GDAL Sponsorship Program https://whova.com/embedded/session/yES4SgdEKaaEK0AD6y4YnM1DD3NRWjkPECkzqJQHhCY%3D/4005895/?widget=primary 

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 08/22/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard