[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Norman Barker, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 01/23/2025. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Project News
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* The Breathe project https://github.com/breathe-doc/breathe/ has onboarded to NumFOCUS and begun implementing fixes and updates in preparation for its next release that will be compatible with recent Sphinx releases.
* Quansight has been onboarded to NumFOCUS and will begin development of updates to conda-build and Conda Forge as necessary to improve GDAL-related recipes, their builds, and the alleviation of interlocking version dependencies (see https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2025-January/059992.html for background on the topic). GDAL uses Conda Forge packages and recipes to provide continuous integration platform coverage for its testing and development.


Maintenance activities update
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Alessandro

* gdal_contour bug fixing https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/11564 to correct how levels and ranges were set by users or interpreted from the incoming data
* Implemented synchronization of OGR layer definition with savepoint mechanisms in GeoPackage and SQLite drivers (started as a QGIS bug but was decided it was best fixed in GDAL https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/59797#issuecomment-2544133498)


Dan

* New warper behavior – mode resampling, provide an option for breaking mode ties, and take weights into account.
* gdal_calc test enhancements in preparation for mimicking them with 'gdal raster calc'
* More work on expression VRTs, including proper expression designation for 'gdal raster calc', with expression formulation inspiration from Rasterio and QGIS
* Added missing clustering API bits to GEOS CAPI

Even

* 3.10.1 was released. See https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.10.1/NEWS.md for details.
* RFC 104 – Continued implementation of `gdal` sub commands https://gdal.org/en/latest/development/rfc/rfc104_gdal_cli.html – `gdal raster clip`, `gdal vector clip`, `gdal raster overview add`, `gdal raster overview delete`, and more.
* RFC 105 – https://gdal.org/en/latest/development/rfc/rfc105_safe_path_manipulation_functions.html Safe CPL file path manipulation functions corrects the behavior of CPL filename handling in multithreaded situations with the unfortunate cost of touching nearly the entire codebase. 
* Sophisticated, contextual Bash completion for new `gdal` command line interface, including contextual suggestions for VSI syntax, driver-specific creation options and more. See https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11563 for implementation details
* libertiff thread safe TIFF driver https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11507
* Added two interleaving modes to COG driver – BAND and TILE https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11541 
* Posted about unused drivers and communicated with numerous folks individually about possibilities for removal of unused drivers


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 02/27/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard