[gdal-dev] Killing useless write side of drivers

[Andrew C Aitchison]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025, Even Rouault via gdal-dev wrote:

> I strongly suspect a number of drivers are hardly used, in particular their 
> write/edition side
>
> My list of candidate victims for removal (of the write side) is at 
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12yk0p8rRK4rAYO_VwXboatWkiILAjE2Cepu32lsHhM8/edit?gid=0#gid=0 
> . Please add your potential comments in the greyed column

I can understand the urge to prune the driver list from time to time
- especially after making a set of 4000 changes to improve the code -
but reading
 	https://www.osgeo.org/projects/gdal/
one might think that the purpose of GDAL was to allow conversion
between geospatial data formats.

I think we need to change the sub-heading on that page from
 	GDAL is a C++ translator library for more than
 	200 raster and vector geospatial data formats

I would prefer it if that was extended to include other purposes,
rather than actually removing that as a significant purpose of GDAL.

I note that this email has already provoked the removal
of one *read-only* driver - https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11684
.

If we are going to be more selective in which data fromats we support,
what can we do to make easier to build out-of-tree drivers as plugins ?

For example could github build gdal packages which other, third-party, 
github projects could pull in as a base to build these ?

-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison                      Kendal, UK
                    andrew at aitchison.me.uk