[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Mike Smith, Chris Toney and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 04/24/2025. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Project News
----------------------------

* GDAL initiated purchase of an annual subscription of ReadTheDocs Gold for both GDAL and PROJ. Besides providing support to RTD, this new subscription provides more builders for both CI builders
* GDAL 3.11.0 release is imminent. See https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.11.0RC1/NEWS.md for news and updates.
* The maintainers team is planning a recorded webinar about the new GDAL CLI being first released in GDAL 3.11. Look for an announcement about "GDAL Command Line Interface Modernization" later in May, with the webinar to take place in the latter half of June.
* Some members of the community will be sprinting again at BiDS in late September. See https://www.bigdatafromspace2025.org/ for details.

Maintenance activities update
------------------------------------------

Alessandro

* PR reviews
* gdal raster fill-nodata implementation

Dan

Dan provided the following report items:

> *Allow VRT pixel functions to add a constant value to a band, or multiply it by a constant factor (#12069)
> *Allow gdallocationinfo to query raster corner points (#12087)
> *Expose options to Python to produce an error when the requested window of a dataset is not entirely within the dataset (#12128)
> *Make it easier to construct vector datasets (#12199) and spatial reference systems (#12162) in Python
> *Add Python method to read from a dataset into a masked array (#12172)
> 
> *Add Python API documentation for ApplyGeoTransform and InvGeoTransform (#12078)
> *Edits to documentation of gdalwarp (#12088) and gdal_translate (#12161)
> 
> *Ensure that requested window is fully covered by gdal_translate output (#12105, #12127)
> *Make gdalwarp produce an error when a requested NoData value or buffer initialization value cannot be parsed (#12198)
> *Prevent precision loss in netCDF geotransform (#12047)
> 
> *Allow test suite to run with pytest < 8.2 (#12086)
> *Improve coverage of gdal_translate error cases (#12130)
> *Update instructions for installing GDAL development version with conda (#12125)
> *Skip some failing tests if external URLs cannot be accessed (#12200)
> 
> *PR reviews
> *Clarify handling of subwindows in gdal_translate code (#12131)

Even

Even was not able to attend and provided the following report items:

> * Add "gdal geom vector make-valid/segmentize/simplify/buffer"
> * Add "gdal raster hillshade/aspect/slope/color-map/tpi/tri" (port of gdaldem)
> * Add "gdal vector grid" (port of gdal_grid)
> * Add "gdal raster footprint" (port of gdal_footrpint)
> * Add "gdal raster clean-collar" (port of nearblack)
> * Add "gdal raster viewshed" (port of gdal_viewshed)
> * Add "gdal vector concat" (port of ogrmerge)
> * Add "gdal raster polygonize" (port of gdal_polygonize)
> * Add a mechanism to register external algorithms, in particular for drivers (compatible with deferred loading)
> * Add "gdal driver geopackage/openfilegdb repack"
> * Add "gdal driver pdf list-layers"
> * Add "gdal vsi list/copy/delete" (port of Python sample scripts gdal_ls/gdal_cp/gdal_rm)
> * Add "gdal vsi sozip create/optimize/list/validate" (port of sozip)
> * Add "gdal raster index" and "gdal driver gti create" (ports of gdaltindex)
> * Improvements in Python bindings for user-friendliness of invokation of "gdal" algorithms, in particular gdal.Run()
> * Merge raster/multidim 'MEM' and vector 'Memory' drivers into a single 'MEM' driver
> * gdal CLI: add suggestion for bad algorithm/argument name based on Damerau-Levenshtein distance
> * GDAL 3.10.3 release
> * GDAL 3.11.0beta1 snapshot preparation
> * Various bug fixes and reviews of pull requests

Javier

* Attended the virtual NGS & CGS Binational Geospatial Software Developers Summit in support of PROJ
* Developed additional/alternative databases for PROJ in support of new North America dynamic height regimes being provided by NGS and CGS so they can be used alongside support information provided by these agencies.


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 05/22/2024 at 13:00 UTC. GDAL PSC members and Pull Request contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard