[gdal-dev] Removing write side of (SDK based) FileGDB driver ?

[Even Rouault]

> If Esri released a new SDK with a changed file format,
> would the SDK driver automatically write it, allowing (QGIS)
> users to write the new format before OpenFileGDB catches up ?

Hard to speculate about the future and black boxes :-)

Possibly yes, but that seems to be more about theory than practice, 
since all recent evidence tends to show that Esri has more or less 
abandoned development of their SDK. The latest 1.5.3 update didn't 
really improve anything, in particular it lacks supports for the new 
64-bit ObjectID and 64 integer data types (I've more or less reverse 
engineered that and there's support for the 64 bit integers in the 
OpenFileGDB driver, but only partial for 64-bit ObjectIDs above 2 
billion since I couldn't figure out some details)

>
> Probably only possibly if the user updates the SDK *and* it is
> binary compatible with the current one. Is this a likely scenario ?

No idea.

At worse we could git revert if a new SDK with significant new 
functionality would be released.

<naive ask>If there are big Esri accounts reading this email, please 
contact your Esri sales and ask them to release a spec of their format. 
My attempts failed, but I don't bring any direct $$ in an obvious way to 
their sale department ;-)</naive ask>

Even

-- 
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Butcher of all kinds of standards, open or closed formats. At the end, this is just about bytes.