Purge Geometry pointer aliases?

[Howard Butler]

> On Jan 10, 2025, at 3:20 PM, Martin Davis <mtnclimb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Given the desire to avoid changes to ABI for micro versions, it sounds like the path to removing pointer aliases is:
> 
> - remove aliases in src in main
> - do not backport alias removal to previous versions (this may create some backporting pain, but since there are relatively few uses of alias in src hopefully this won't be too bad)
> - remove aliases in test code as a lower priority, perhaps on an as-encountered basis

Can we please stash the aliases in a header file that is still installed but nothing in the GEOS API actually uses? Then can we mark it all [[deprecated]]?

This change is very likely to break people who have historical codebases that have tightly wrapped around GEOS. A special-for-them header to ease their transition would be a bit courteous, whereas an abrupt change of types in an a part of their codebase that is likely ancient is going to be very disorienting. 

Howard