[Liblas-devel] Dealing with "bad" data

[Volker Wichmann]

Am 04.11.2010 18:22, schrieb Mateusz Loskot:
> On 04/11/10 17:06, Volker Wichmann wrote:
>> provide a utility which tries to fix broken files but always throw an
>> exception in case a file is not compliant to the specification
>
> For me, the two parts of this stay in contradiction.
> Always throwing if file is not compliant, means never accept broken
> data.

Yes, this is what I'm in favour.

> Never accept broken data, implies not try to fix it.

Yes, I think this is not something which libLAS needs to deal with.

>
> Whatever it is called, strict and transitional mode (enable/disable with
> single switch for libLAS utility) or a separate utility trying to
> recover whatever is recoverable from broken data...
> The job of implementing those utils repairing broken data produced by
> companies loosely interpreting ASPRS LAS will be on expanses of libLAS.

I think this is in contradiction - in case you implement some fallback 
mechanisms in libLAS you will already provide something like a "tool". I 
fully agree that it is impossible to provide a utility which allows to 
fix almost all broken files - but I think such a utility could be more 
easily extended to catch specific errors than libLAS core. Why not start 
with a utility that catches the issues mentioned by Howard?

best regards,
Volker