[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Chris Toney, Michael Smith, Even Rouault, Seth Girvin, Michael Sumner, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 05/28/2026. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

# Project News

* 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 
* A change is going to come "fixing" advertisement of multi geometry types in the OGR shapefile driver https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14602 

## Releases

* GDAL 3.13.0 "Iowa City" is now available https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/releases/tag/v3.13.0  Release notes are available at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.13.0/NEWS.md 

## Conferences
* Even and Seth will be giving the newly created GDAL Command Line Workshop at FOSS4GE in Timisoara, Romania on July 3rd, 2026. It will include exercises on tiling, merging, VSI, pixel operations, multidim, and more! See https://2026.europe.foss4g.org/schedule/workshops/ for details and get your ticket at https://pretix.geo-spatial.org/foss4ge2026/timisoara2026/
* Even will be giving "State of GDAL: What's new in GDAL 3.12 and 3.13" on June 29th, 2026 at FOSS4GE https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-europe-2026/talk/9AQJYA/
* Javier will be presenting "PROJ is not only about projections" on June 30th, 2026 at FOSS4GE. https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-europe-2026/talk/SSCMFH/ 
* Howard will present "Building the GDAL Sponsorship Program" at FOSS4G Hiroshima on September 1st, 2026 https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-2026/talk/8YFSA8/ 
* FOSS4GNA will be November 2-4, 2026. Call for proposals is now open! https://www.foss4gna.org/cfp-2026

# Maintenance activities update

## Alessandro

* ``gdal raster proximity`` doc https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/14522
* ``gdal vector export-schema`` https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/14640


## Seth 

### Two new user- orientated pages

* https://gdal.org/en/latest/user/errors.html
* https://gdal.org/en/latest/user/debug.html

### Examples and testing of ``export-schema``:

* https://gdal.org/en/latest/programs/gdal_vector_export_schema.html

### Updated pipeline table of contents for pipelines

* https://gdal.org/en/latest/programs/gdal_raster_pipeline.html#steps
* https://gdal.org/en/latest/programs/gdal_vector_pipeline.html#steps

### MSSQL driver examples

* https://gdal.org/en/latest/drivers/vector/mssqlspatial.html#drivers/vector/mssqlspatial-4

## Dan

* AI security report activity – NetCDF and GRIB
* ``gdal vector read`` now supports WKT https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14499
* ``gdal vector explode[collections]`` support for after zonal


## Even

* GDAL 3.13.0 release
* 100+ items. 5000+ "little attention" items since beginning of the sponsorship program!
* ~10 Anthropic Mythos security topics – concentrated in NetCDF and GRIB
* PROJ ETRS89 issues and fallout continues – EPSG now reverting incompatible changes
* Shapefile multi advertisement https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14602 
* GDAL CLI Workshop preparation – content to be made available online after the conference, potentially included directly in GDAL docs
* GDAL 3.13.1 release imminent
* Discussion about vendoring and maintenance of PhoenixLidar's libkml fork/updates https://github.com/phoenixlidar/libkml/ for a path forward for OGR KML
* GDAL LLM Project Policy https://gdal.org/en/stable/community/ai_tool_policy.html 
* Planning to attend the June 18th arrow+parquet meetup in Paris

# Next Meeting

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 06/25/2026 at 13:00 UTC. Project contributors should contact Howard Butler for an invite.

# Online Version

https://gist.github.com/hobu/1e65ec518b737772b24af6174ad829fd

# 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