[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Javier Jimenez Shaw, and Michael Sumner held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 05/23/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Discussion Items
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* GDAL 3.9.0 was released on May 7th, 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
* 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.
* A discussion about re-homing various GDAL-related documentation activities and tutorials on places such as Stack Exchange took place. No action is expected, but if people wish to move content to GDAL's docs, PRs will definitely be considered. 
* Curve support is coming to GEOS and there was some discussion about possible impacts to OGR. One consideration is moving linearization of curves in from OGR to GEOS. This brought on discussion about whether or not to make GEOS a hard dependency of GDAL, but no action or decisions were considered.

Maintenance activities update
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Dan

* Light activity.
* Enhancement of documentation on how to set various config options and substitutions
* Dan expects a funding extension to support efforts past August.

Alessandro

* PR reviews
* Continued adaptation of the argparse https://github.com/p-ranav/argparse argument parser to the rest of the GDAL and OGR utilities. To model GDAL's error handling, a PR was submitted to argparse to fix a validation scenario that GDAL depends upon. 
* Alessandro's activity is expected to be less over the next 3-4 months.

Even

* Documentation building improvements
  * Added CMake targets
  * Upgraded container that builds docs
* Typical PR and mailing list activities
* libgeotiff 1.7.2 (and 1.7.3) release https://github.com/OSGeo/libgeotiff/releases/tag/1.7.2 and https://github.com/OSGeo/libgeotiff/releases/tag/1.7.3 

Michael

* gdalraster for R

Javier

* Exploring enhancements to add a C API function inspired by code in the GDAL RPC DEM interpolator that can be used by gdallocationinfo

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 06/27/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard