[gdal-dev] CSharp bindings queued for removal (was Re: GDAL CSharp bindings maintainers/contributors listening... ?)

[Tamas Szekeres]

Even,

The silence is not necessary because we neglect the C# bindings, just
because we are doing our daily work (using the bindings).
I'm personally maintaining the GDAL <https://www.nuget.org/packages/GDAL>
and it's related nuget packages based on these bindings for several years
and it has 658.1K downloads overall and 147 downloads per day in average.
The packages are used by projects such as ArduPilot/MissionPlanner,
DotSpatial, SharpMap which are also widely used projects, so we can
consider the importance sigificant, and such change (removing the bindings
entirely) would involve general dissatisfaction against GDAL I think.
In my opinion, we should also distinguish whether an issue reported against
the binding is a blocker or just a nice to have change. In my understanding
the implementation of the UTF-8 to unicode conversion at all relevant
methods would be beneficial, but not something which would block the
overall usage (it has already been done for the most important parts I
think). If the required functionality is really important to someone, I
think he/she will spend some time to contribute it or pay someone to make
it happen.

I also think that the gdal-dev list is not proactively monitored by the
GDAL users (or by the indirect users) well enough, so that we can make such
decisions to remove a binding or a driver nased on that. Whe should
probably find some alternative ways (like surveys or feedback forms at the
site or gather some other statistics like doc page loads and downloads) by
which the community can express their interest against a specific component
and would be sufficient to detect disinterests.

In any case, I'll review and will be trying to to sort out some open issues
against csharp in the next few weeks.

Best regards,

Tamas


Even Rouault via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> ezt írta (időpont:
2025. jan. 29., Sze, 5:33):

> Hearing silence, the only logical conclusion is that there is no interest
> ==> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/11746
>
> Le 27/09/2024 à 20:15, Even Rouault via gdal-dev a écrit :
>
> Hi,
>
> This is your regular remainder that nobody in the core GDAL maintainer
> team is a CSharp aficionado (we don't have a personal grief against it,
> just that we are blatantly ignorant, at least speaking for myself !), so
> related tickets about it will definitely result in no action.
>
> See
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22csharp+bindings%22
>
> The current trend is that people seem to be annoyed by UTF-8 related
> issues. The issue is likely that our methods that accept or take a const
> char* in the SWIG bindings should use a specific typemap to map to CSharp
> Unicode strings instead of the "C" one or whatever those concepts are
> called in CSharp. There is an existing "utf8_path" typemap that is used in
> method that accept filenames, that should probably be renamed to
> utf8_string and be used more extensively. And probably with a version of
> the methods to also return a raw C string / bytearray in the cases where
> drivers don't know the encoding and might return "random" stuff. Cf pull
> request #10652 where I did something for Java that suffered from that later
> issue.
> Happy pull requests!
>
> Even
>
> -- http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
> -- http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
> Grumpy maintainer.
> "De l'égo à l'égoût, il n'y a qu'une bouche mal refermée", André Isaac
>
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