[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Javier Jiminez Shaw, and Sean Gillies held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 03/28/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Sponsorship Updates
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* Dynamic Graphic, Inc. sponsored GDAL at Supporter level

Discussion Items
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 GDAL 3.8.5 RC1 is expected next week. It is intended to be the final 3.8 maintenance release with 3.9.0 being expected in May 2024

Maintenance activities update
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Dan

* Addressed a few Python bindings crash bugs
* Python API documentation cleanups and reorganization to make discovery of methods groups by typical usage stories

Alessandro

* GDAL PR reviews
    * Vector file with Polygon Z with 2 coords causing errors https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/9326
    * GTiff: endless loop when resampling (bilinear) under some circumstances https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/9427
    *Inconsistent Output Dimensions from gdal.warp() with Identical outputBounds https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/9467 
* Small improvement to code formatting to add line breaks after methods definition https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/9498 

Even

* Exploring implementation of a consistent argument parsing library for all of the GDAL and OGR command line utilities. This library-wide update will provide a number of quality-of-life improvements for users of the command line utilities:
  * Usage messages will be consistently formatted
  * Longer help messages
  * Multiple specification of the same arguments should work more consistently and not fail silently in some cases
  * Potential for leverage of same framework to specify input for driving CLI activity with config files
  * Ability to remove lots of boilerplate CLI parsing code in the utilities
* RFC99 was merged that provided preliminary implementation to address management and bookkeeping of coordinate precision in OGR drivers that can leverage it. See https://github.com/rouault/gdal/blob/rfc99_text/doc/source/development/rfc/rfc99_geometry_coordinate_precision.rst for discussion
* Facilitated the release of OpenJPEG 2.5.2. See https://github.com/uclouvain/openjpeg/releases/tag/v2.5.2 for more information
* libtiff PSC motion passed and the project is now managed under GDAL-like processes
* Added a getDataset method on Layers to ensure that library users are not required to memoize Layer/Dataset relationships
* Action on over 100 tickets and PRs

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 04/25/2024 at 9:00 EDT. Any PSC members are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard