[gdal-dev] 2024 GDAL Users Survey

[Rahkonen Jukka]

Hi,

Certainly there are lots of GDAL command line users who run on Windows. Using GDAL on Windows as an end user has been super easy for me since I found FWTools with simple unzip-and-run installation. MS4W brought GDAL tools in the similar way together with Mapserver. Then the Gisinternals binaries appeared and now there are also OSGeo4W and Conda. Building GDAL for Windows is probably awful, but fortunately there are folks who do that for us.  We must just survive with the drivers which are packaged into the deliverables. A nice extra is that it is easy to have different GDAL versions on the same computer, for example any of these https://www.gisinternals.com/archive.php.

-Jukka Rahkonen-

Lähettäjä: gdal-dev <gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> Puolesta Daniel Evans via gdal-dev
Lähetetty: keskiviikko 30. lokakuuta 2024 16.23
Vastaanottaja: Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co>
Kopio: gdal dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Aihe: Re: [gdal-dev] 2024 GDAL Users Survey

Hi Howard,

>  To my eye, that means our respondent pool is strongly tilted toward power users and developers, as I would expect a much larger mix of Windows users.

Where has the survey been announced? I've only seen it on this list, which is explicitly for "developers using and building GDAL/OGR", which will skew the pool of respondents!

I'd be interested to know if there truly is a large userbase of people using it as a command line tool on Windows. My experience is that the barrier to entry for building and using GDAL standalone on Windows is very high, and I rely solely on Windows Subsystem for Linux (hence I responded as a Linux user, not Windows) or drop down to something with an installer, like QGIS, that "Just Works".

Cheers,
Daniel

On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 at 13:25, Howard Butler via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
All,

The first ever GDAL Users Survey 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. It will close on November 11th. Please help us by contributing and widely circulating it.

As with all surveys, it is susceptible to bias by the audience that shows up to answer. As of right now, there are only ~290 responses with nearly 70% of them saying they are Linux and OSX users. To my eye, that means our respondent pool is strongly tilted toward power users and developers, as I would expect a much larger mix of Windows users. For background, there are ~2500 mailing list subscribers, so please consider this a nag to go fill it out and help guide our efforts in the next year.

Howard

🤔, I guess I'll need to work on some user validation stuff for the next survey...

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