[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Even Rouault, Seth Girvin, and Michael Sumner held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 06/25/2026. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

# Project News

* The GDAL PSC reached out to a project called 'OxiGDAL' and asked it to rename.  
* Authenticated VSI activity within cloud organizations that are not sponsoring GDAL now emits a log message about it. See https://gdal.org/en/latest/sponsors/cloud_phone_home.html for details about it.
* The GDAL LLM Project Policy is now active https://gdal.org/en/stable/community/ai_tool_policy.html 
* Multi geometry types in the OGR shapefile driver now have a behavior change https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14602 

## Releases

* GDAL 3.13.1 is now available https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/releases/tag/v3.13.1  Release notes are available at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.13.0/NEWS.md 

## Conferences

* Howard will present "Building the GDAL Sponsorship Program" at FOSS4G Hiroshima on September 1st, 2026 https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-2026/talk/8YFSA8/ 
* Howard submitted "Code is a liability – contributing to GDAL in the LLM era" to FOSS4GNA November 2-4, 2026 in Sacramento, CA USA https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-na-2026/talk/review/ZFXERNW3CGUFRTZEKYD7YZ3RLKZKEMPM 
* Dan submitted "GDAL in 2026: your script's a one-liner now" to FOSS4GNA November 2-4, 2026 in Sacramento, CA USA https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-na-2026/talk/review/E7TQEBZ9ZTM77JPJPMBHQEGMXQACJRV7 
* FOSS4GNA will be November 2-4, 2026. Call for proposals is now open! https://www.foss4gna.org/cfp-2026

# Maintenance activities update

## Alessandro

* 40+ PR activity
* ogr2ogr returning 0 on vrt errors https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/14826
* ``gdal raster create `` – add % and size https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/14823


## Seth 

### FOSS4GE GDAL workshop

* testing and walk through
* sixteen exercises
* created pipeline diagrams with gdalgviz https://github.com/geographika/gdalgviz 
* prep for inclusion in GDAL main docs

### User cookbook

* 100+ commands in GDAL now
* linkage to workshop materials 


## Dan

* Tests now running with UseExceptions() (and subsequent cleanup and bug fixing as a result of this change)
* GEOS release – significant work on curve support and a difficult MSVC-only bug


## Even

* GDAL 3.13.1 release
* 80+ items.
* MRF driver open/caching issue https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14752 and https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/14690 
* Made all cli utilities pipeline'able
* add --format=text to mdim info https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14799 
* libtiff 4.7.2 release and security activity
* read-only icechunk driver https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14755 
* GDAL CLI Workshop preparation. See it at https://gdal-cli-workshop.github.io/ and expect it in the main GDAL docs in the coming months.
* Even presented at the June 18th arrow+parquet meetup in Paris. Learn more about GDAL's implementations of columnar formats from his deck at https://download.osgeo.org/gdal/presentations/GDAL_%20integrating%20columnar%20formats%20into%20a%20row-oriented%20framework.pdf 

# Next Meeting

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 07/23/2026 at 13:00 UTC. Project contributors should contact Howard Butler for an invite.

# Online Version

https://gist.github.com/hobu/1a67a821ae8105e382486b0e507f6324


# Financial Support

* Support GDAL with a new t-shirt! Visit https://gdal.org/tshirt/ to purchase. Change your country preference on the bottom of the page. Profits from swag sales go directly to the GDAL Sponsorship Program via NumFOCUS! 
* Make an individual or corporate donation online https://numfocus.org/donate-to-gdal 
* Organize a contribution to the GDAL Sponsorship Program https://gdal.org/en/latest/sponsors/index.html#sponsorship-program