[Liblas-devel] libLAS 1.6.0b1 Released

[Howard Butler]

10/12/2010

All,

The libLAS team is pleased to announce the release of libLAS 1.6.0b1.  1.6.0 is the next release after the 1.2+ release series, and it brings a number of new features and improvements to the library.  The biggest changes are CMake is now required to build the library, and Boost 1.38+ is now a required dependency.  I know we haven't had a release in nearly a year, but there have been nearly 1000 commits to the repository, and things have continued to trudge along.

<http://liblas.org/development/release_plan.html> contains the highlights.  Head to <http://liblas.org/download.html> to obtain your source release.  A windows binary release should be provided through OSGeo4W in the next week or so.

Thanks for all of the bug reports and feedback!  People I'd like to thank include: Mateusz Loskot for reworking the binary i/o of libLAS and helping greatly with the design of the new liblas::Schema implementation.  Gary Huber for providing the octree index for libLAS that applications (and soon the library proper) can now start using to speed up their window queries.  Andrew Bell for writing a clever bit of code called the "chipper"  (<http://liblas.org/utilities/lasblock.html>) that is a critical component in the process pipeline for tiling LiDAR data into a database such as Oracle (see <http://liblas.org/utilities/las2oci.html>) or PostGIS.  Frank Warmerdam for enhancing libLAS and the entire Open Source GIS stack to now give us the ability to do vertical datum transformation operations. Finally, I'd like to thank Dave Finnegan and Mike Smith and the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory for providing the resources to keep me grinding away on libLAS.  We've come a long way in the past year, and I can't wait to start diving into libPC <http://liblas.org/development/release_plan.html#libpc> in the next.

Howard