[gdal-dev] Re-organizing source tree regarding drivers?

[Daniel Baston]

While the current organization is definitely not what we'd start with, I'm
not sure the benefits or reorganization are worth making it harder to
follow the commit history. But I have no strong objection if others would
rather reorganize.

Dan

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 8:28 PM Even Rouault via gdal-dev <
gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> with a number of drivers being raster+vector our current source tree
> organization is a bit messy.
>
> For example, we have:
>
> - ogr/ogrsf_frmts/gpkg: the GeoPackage driver started vector-only and
> then raster was added
>
> - frmts/mbtiles: the MBTiles driver started raster-only and then vector
> was added
>
> - ogr/ogrsf_frmts/pmtiles: you can guess what I will write here
>
> - frmts/mem
>
> I'm hesitating between:
>
> - putting all drivers below a drivers/  directory
>
> - or having drivers/raster/ , drivers/vector/ and drivers/mixed/
>
> This later organization avoids a bit the issue of a monolithic drivers/
> with 250+ subdirectories (who knows if Windows might not limit to 256
> :-)),  but it may involve moving code around when something that was
> raster or vector only later gains the other capability.
>
> We should likely migrate OGR_ENABLE_DRIVER_XXXX CMake variables to using
> the GDAL_ prefix.
>
> And C entry points for plugins would be all GDALRegisterXXXX() and
> shared libary names all gdal_XXXXX.dll/so
>
> While we are it:
>
> - gcore/ would be split between core/generic (driver and dataset
> classes) and core/raster.
>
> - gcore/multidim/ --> core/multidim/
>
> - ogr/ and ogr/ogrsf_frmts/generic would become core/vector/  , possibly
> with a core/vector/geometry for core geometry classes, and core/crs/ for
> OSR related classes
>
> Thoughts? (I'm wondering how such a plan could be executed without
> freezing all pull request activity in the meantime to limit conflicts,
> although git might perhaps be smart enough to detect files moving around)
>
> Even
>
> --
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>
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