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

Thu Jan 30 09:59:52 PST 2025

Maybe the bindings should be moved out if gdal to a separate repo so those interested in the bindings can monitor that specific repo and not gdal in general. 

Mike

-- 

Michael Smith

Remote Sensing/GIS Center

US Army Corps of Engineers

From: gdal-dev <gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> on behalf of Tamas Szekeres via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Reply-To: Tamas Szekeres <szekerest at gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 12:41 PM
To: Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com>
Cc: "gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org" <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [gdal-dev] CSharp bindings queued for removal (was Re: GDAL CSharp bindings maintainers/contributors listening... ?)

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 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
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http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.

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