[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 06/27/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Discussion Items
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* GDAL 3.9.1 was released on June 26th, 2024. A synopsis of the additions, changes, bug fixes, and enhancements is available from https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/release/3.9/NEWS.md
* Completing migration of GDAL's documentation to ReadTheDocs infrastructure was discussed. The PR implementing it will be refreshed and users are encouraged to to visit https://gdal.readthedocs.io/ and report any issues or findings about it on the PR at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/8681 
* The PR to include Nix build configuration in the GDAL tree was submitted by Ivan Mincik https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/10309 was discussed.
* Howard has been communicating with the company responsible for the MrSID DSK and was told there will no more builds provided. "I wanted to follow up and let you know that we understand the importance of this matter to you but after careful consideration, our leadership team has made the decision not to proceed with any updates to the SDK at this time." It is unclear if this means no MrSID builds at all or just for now, but given the current build's age and compiler support matrix, it is likely to become a significant data access issue for many with GDAL going forward.
* Microsoft has renewed their gold sponsorship for FY24. Thank you Microsoft for your continued support of the GDAL Sponsorship Program!

Maintenance activities update
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Dan

* NASA proposal for next three years submitted
* Reviewed PRs
* Finished moving leftover content from Trac in preparation for decomissioning
* Discussed RAII enhancements and potential public API impacts of implementation

Even

* 90+ ticket traffic and PR reviews
* Made a driver pass to relax identification criteria when -if is used to help driver prefixing and partial bypass of co-implemented drivers such as JSON/GeoJSON or HDF/NetCDF
* Spent a lot of time investigating and working around GitHub CI Windows SDK issues and breakage caused by DLL Hell https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/10004 
* Implemented support to allow building some drivers entirely STANDALONE against out-of-tree GDAL libraries
* See you at FOSS4GE!

Javier

* See you at FOSS4GE!

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 07/25/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard