[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes (and GDAL Users Survey)

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 10/24/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Sponsorship Activity
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* NASA has continued their Gold-level sponsorship of the project through Dan Baston and iSciences, LLC in the form of funding "Sustaining the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library" for three years. Congratulations Dan and iSciences! https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-funds-open-source-software-underpinning-scientific-innovation/ 
* Safe Software has renewed their Silver sponsorship of the GDAL Sponsorship Program. Thanks again for your continued support this year!
* New sponsor Phoenix LiDAR Systems https://phoenixlidar.com/ joined at the Supporter level. Thanks Phoenix!
* Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) joined at the Bronze level. Thanks LINZ, and congratulations on being the first government entity to directly sponsor GDAL through NumFOCUS and the GDAL Sponsorship Program!
* Development activities funded or supported by the GDAL Sponsorship Program can now be filtered in GitHub by their tag https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/labels/funded%20through%20GSP

Users Survey
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* Howard created the first ever GDAL Users Survey, which is now open for feedback at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdMXygtDb5M0Ov0KK0u2wKkev1rMqAjRdTlwMeCl7Z1TGJTLw/viewform The survey is an attempt to provide structured guidance for the maintenance program to focus its efforts in the coming year. Please contribute and help us circulate it!

Maintenance activities update
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Alessandro

* PR reviews
* RFC 103 – OGR_SCHEMA field definition overrides for vector schemas https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11071 

Dan

* NASA award!
* gdalwarp and gdal_translate doc improvements
* Normalization of specification of memory size options through utilities and options
* CLI arg parsing callbacks for numeric input validation and sanitization 
* Discussion about killing dead utilities such as ogrdissolve and gdalwarpsimple 

Even

* 90+ ticket activity and reviews
* GDAL 3.9.3 released https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.9.3/NEWS.md 
* GDAL 3.10.0beta1 released Oct 15th, with rc1 expected this week
* RFC 102 and PROJ RFC 8 – Optional support for embedding of resources such as proj.db and GDAL_DATA *inside* GDAL library itself
* Improve warper performance for cubic and lanczos interpolation ~30% https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11051 
* RISC-V support discussion

Javier

* Met up with Thomas Knudsen and Kristian Evers from PROJ PSC at Tromsø, Norway for the Future Frames of Reference workshop https://itsnordicplus.com/event/future-frames-of-reference-workshop/ https://mapstodon.space/@kbevers/113353010933062765 
* Discussion about desire to have full PROJ in WASM environments


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 11/28/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard

PS, Please contribute to the GDAL User Survey at  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdMXygtDb5M0Ov0KK0u2wKkev1rMqAjRdTlwMeCl7Z1TGJTLw/viewform