[Liblas-devel] libLAS 1.7.0 released

[Howard Butler]

All,

I am pleased to announce the release of libLAS 1.7.0.  libLAS 1.7.0 signifies libLAS going into "maintenance" mode from this point forward unless someone else steps forward to bring momentum to it.  libLAS 1.7.0 has limited support for LAS 1.3, and no support for LAS 1.4.  If someone wishes to develop these items, I would be happy to help guide them, but all of my active development time is now dedicated to PDAL (http://pointcloud.org).

Martin Isenburg has been keeping a rapid development pace with LASlib, however, and now that it is licensed under a proper Open Source license (its lack of a license was a primary motivating factor for libLAS' existence), I would encourage folks doing new development efforts to take a look at it.  Additionally, because most libLAS integrators are using the libLAS C API in some form, a good project would be to adapt the libLAS C API to Martin's LASlib codebase and obtain the benefits of renewed momentum and ongoing development (and probably performance to boot). I would be happy to help guide this effort too if someone steps forward to need it.

Changes since the 1.7.0b2 release include:

- Fixes to liblas::Classification::SetClassification
- Close dangling streams in cases where the C API can't open a file https://github.com/libLAS/libLAS/issues/3
- Warnings cleanups to satisfy clang

Obtain the latest source copy from 

http://liblas.org/download.html

OSGeo4W builds have also been updated.

Howard