[gdal-dev] Proposal: Native MrSID DSDK Support for Upcoming GDAL Version

[Greg Troxel]

It's hard to tell what you are asking for.

You're writing from gmail and have what looks like an odd domain name in
your signature.  I'm not in charge here, but my social expectations are
that people acting on behalf of a company write from their company email
address.

I would suggest that you do the following (or hire someone to do it for
you):

  - Publish a web page with up-to-date instructions for dealing with
    mrsid in gdal, including integrated builds and plugin builds.  (All
    the ones I found were old.)

  - Prepare a detailed proposal of what you'd like to change, so that
    those familiar with the sources can understand what you really mean
    and the consequences.

  - If that seems ok to the maintainers, prepare a PR.


I did find

  https://gist.github.com/james-roden/01d9ea266528ed685319adb60222953e

which is pretty up to date and also looks as easy to deal with as is
possible with proprietary software.   About the only complaint I could
make about gdal is that there are 4 cmake variables:

    && cmake -DMRSID_ROOT=${MRSID_DIR} \
        -DMRSID_INCLUDE_DIR=${MRSID_DIR}/include \
        -DMRSID_LIBRARY=${MRSID_DIR}/lib/libltidsdk.so \
        -DGDAL_USE_MRSID=ON .. \

when the "autoconf is the one true way" part of me would expect the
analog of

    --with-mrsid-${MRSID_DIR}

and the rest to be picked up from there.   But really, that's trivial,
and I somehow don't think you mean "it's causing us real trouble to set
4 variables in our build script (which is of course under configuration
management) instead of 1".