[geos-devel] blowing up on negative value buffer() call

[Leo Shklovskii]

Hi Geos-Devel,

I'm using GeoDjango (which wraps GEOS) to manipulate some polygons 
representing states, cities & counties.

We simplify many of the polygons in our original census dataset and as a 
result, some of them overlap (when they didn't originally). Because of 
this, I need to reduce some of them in size before I run queries on them 
to prevent wrong results from 'intersects' queries.

The first thing I tried seems to work fairly well:

location.mpoly.buffer(-.01).buffer(0)

Ideally, the first call shrinks the poly and the second one makes sure 
that its valid.

Unfortunately, I've found several polygons that are valid but cause the 
first call to buffer() to blow up (memory leak + spiked cpu + doesn't 
return).

Should I file this as a GEOS bug? or am I not using buffer() correctly?

If the latter, what would be a better way to shrink a polygon?

Thanks in advance for your time!

--
--Leo