[Liblas-devel] LAS 1.2 and SRS improvements

[Hamish]

Howard Butler wrote:
> Debian has the luxury of using GDAL by default, which is the only sane
> way this should go. But I can't make GDAL a hard requirement for libLAS.

how about some sort of "SRS crippled" warning to the user if libgeotiff-
only or without either of gdal/libgeotiff. (I expect the low-cal users
don't want to see that over and over though :)

> Another complication is likely to arise when GDAL in turn starts
> linking against libLAS, but we'll burn that bridge when we need to :)

we solved that circular dependency in GRASS by way of the gdal-plugin*.
before that it was a complete nightmare for Debian to auto-build the
packages. Both due to the order of compiling things**, and e.g. if a new
grass package came out, GDAL had to be rebuilt, and so the many packages
depending on GDAL had to be rebuilt, and so on, and so on.

[*] http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/gdal-grass-1.4.3.tar.gz
   see also http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libgdal1-1.5.0-grass
   and the qgis-plugin-grass package (similar problem for QGIS<->GRASS)

[**] the old method IIRC was to 1) build gdal without grass support, 2)
build grass with gdal support, 3) remove & rebuild gdal with grass support.
on 11+ hardware platforms.


Hamish