[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Mike Smith, Michael Sumner, Even Rouault, Chris Toney and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 05/22/2025. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

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

* GDAL 3.11.0 was released. See https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.11.0/NEWS.md for details
* Even, Howard, Dan, and Mike will be presenting the GDAL 3.11 CLI Deep Dive webinar on June 3rd at 1400 UTC. Visit https://numfocus-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oW6mA6DNSKe8FUTm1-tkRQ to register. Over 500 people are currently registered to attend. It will be posted on the OSGeo YouTube once it is available.
* Seth Gervin and Harrissou Sant-anna are now actively making documentation PR traffic. Emphasis areas included Python API docstrings and documentation connectivity
* Even and Javier will be presenting at FOSS4G Europe in Mostar 14-20 July, 2025
* GDAL 3.11.1 expected first part of June
* 2025 GDAL Sponsorship Program fundraising has been rather grim, especially with renewals of some gold and silver sponsors. If your organization is interested in stepping forward to provide support, please contact me directly.

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

Alessandro

* PR reviews
* gdal proximity

Dan

Dan provided the following report items:

> * Enhance “gdal raster mosaic” to use a pixel function to blend overlapping inputs. (#12385)
> * Add VRT pixel functions for reclassification, mean, median, mode, geometric mean, harmonic mean (#12232, #12248, #12264, #12265, #12418)
> * Make VRT pixel functions handle NoData pixels correctly (#12410)
> * Add “gdal vector geom simplify-coverage” to simplify shared boundaries of a polygon dataset without introducing gaps or overlaps (#12370)
> * Improve naming of some elements in new command line interface (#12233, #12250)
> * Add –output-type argument to gdal raster calc (#12266)
> 
> Documentation improvements:
> * Clarify how VRT files handle NoData values (#12403)
> * Add images to demonstrate different operations in gdal vector layer-algebra (#12428)
> 
> Bug fixes
> * Prevent command-line utilities from accepting NaN for certain numeric inputs (#12310)
> * Raise error for incorrectly-formed VRT files with pixel functions (#12415)
> * Raise error for incorrectly-formatted lists passed as command line arguments (#12425)
> 
> Project maintenance:
> * Review 24 pull requests
> * Export CMake targets so other projects can link against a GDAL development tree (#12217)
> * Clean up argument handling code for VRT expressions (#12400)
> * Update VRT derived band code to use types with automatic memory management (#12404)

Even

Even provided the following report items:

> * CVE-2025-29480 investigation
> * gdal raster clip: port options from gdal vector clip
> * Fix a few issues reported on beta1 regarding GDAL cli
> * Add 'gdal raster pixel-info' (port of gdallocationinfo)
> * Add 'gdal raster tile' (port of gdal2tiles): 3x to 6x times faster sometimes
> * Add 'gdal vsi move' and 'gdal vsi sync'
> * GDALAlgorithm: various small enhancements in the framework
> * GDAL 3.11.0 RC1, RC2 and final
> * Add 'gdal raster rgb-to-palette' (rgb2pct.py)
> * Add 'gdal dataset' port of 'gdal manage'
> * Add 'gdal raster overview refresh'
> * Make 'gdal raster fill-nodata/sieve/viewshed/proximity/rgb-to-palette' pipeline-able
> * Add 'gdal raster update'
> * Add 'gdal vector layer-algebra' (port of ogr_layer_algebra.py)
> * gdal raster reproject: add a -j/--num-threads option and default to ALL_CPUS
> * VRTDerivedRaster: optimizations, in particular for sum(), and make 'gdal raster calc' use sum() when possible
> * Add 'gdal vector index' (port of ogrtindex)
> * Add 'gdal raster color-merge' (port of hsv_merge.py sample script)
> * Restore GSBG (Golden Software Surfer Binary Grid 6.0) support
> * Move 'gdal vector geom' subcommands directly under 'gdal vector'
> * Internal libtiff/LIBERTIFF: speed-up Predictor decompression. About 40% faster


Chris

* Release version 2.0 of gdalraster R bindings https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gdalraster/index.html
* Benchmarking read performance

Michael S

* VRT connection argument 'transpose' option

Javier

* Investigated PROJ security warning
* Development of projinfo as a library similar to GDAL CLIs


The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 06/26/2024 at 13:00 UTC. GDAL PSC members and Pull Request contributors are welcome to contact me for an invite.

Howard