[gdal-dev] What are vector field width and precision good for?

[Even Rouault]

Sean,

> What are vector field width and precision good for in 2024? These 
> concepts were inherited from MS Access via Shapefile, I believe. I've 
> been wondering if I can stop supporting them in my Fiona project 
> without breaking workflows badly. Numpy data types don't have width 
> and precision. Neither do, for example, Parquet and Arrow.
>
> Anybody using these for anything crucial?

If Fiona had only a read side you could likely ignore them.  But writing 
all those formats (shapefile, mapinfo, etc.) require setting those 
properties. If you don't specify them, the OGR drivers will use some 
defaults, that might not always be appropriate.

Even

-- 

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