[gdal-dev] GDAL release compatibility with external libraries

[Greg Troxel]

"Fox, Shawn D (US) via gdal-dev" <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> I recently read the details of RFC 98: Build requirements for GDAL 3.9
> - GDAL
> documentation<https://gdal.org/en/stable/development/rfc/rfc98_build_requirements_gdal_3_9.html>,
> and I was wondering if there is any similar info for previous versions
> of GDAL.  It's the first time I have seen a clear set of build
> requirements for a particular version of GDAL.  I have read release
> notes for v3.4.2 and some others but I can't find anything similar to
> that for other GDAL releases.

Ideally this would be in README or BUILDING etc. and my impression is
that many of the open source geo programs have improved over the last
few years about specifying requirements in such a file in the sources.
As a packager it's something I look for because I want to encode the
requirement in the build control file.

The other way to to find out is to read configure.ac or CMakeLists and
see what versions are required.  That isn't 100% reliable, as it is
possible a version will be accepted but be problematic; but it's a good
start.

> I'm mostly concerned about the SQLite requirement.  Our team wasn't
> quite ready to upgrade SQLite to 3.31.0 so I'm wondering if there is a
> way to know what the latest version of GDAL is that will support v
> 3.23 of SQLite.

3.23 sounds pretty old to me.

  $ sqlite3 --version
  3.48.0 2025-01-14 11:05:00 d2fe6b05f38d9d7cd78c5d252e99ac59f1aea071d669830c1ffe4e8966e84010 (64-bit)

I guess even that's old by now, with 3.49.1!

3.31.0 was released on 2020-01-22  and 3.32.0 on 2020-05-22.

3.23.0 was releaseed on 2018-04-02.  3.24.0 was released in 2018-06-04.
You might look back in gdal release history to find the gdal minor
version whose .0 is in 2018, and then try the highest micro.

I think you'll be missing a huge amount of capability and bug fixes by
choosing to run gdal that's 6 years old.