[mapserver-dev] Design/Re-Design consideration

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Hi all,

I really like gdal and ogr. I can't say I use them all the time, but 
they work and do the job when I need them and I would be lost without 
them on some jobs. So Thanks and keep up the good work.

I want to toss out an idea that I think would make gdal/ogr better. This 
comes from my frustration with the fact that as more formats are 
supported, the more system library dependencies that are required to 
install it. I was horrified when I went to build mapserver with wfs 
support and I only use shapefiles on postgis layers that I had to 
install gdal and that pulled in some 20-30 other system packages!!!!

This is insane from my perspective. I don't need any of those packages 
for the work I'm doing, maybe mapserver should not require gdal for wfs, 
but I'm sure there is a good reason for that choice.

Regardless, The idea that I want to offer is that I think it would be 
very cool from a packaging point of view if gdal/ogr could take a page 
from the PHP book and configure a directory of runtime loadable modules. 
There would be a base package and then each format or group of formats 
would be loaded at runtime if it existed in the modules directory. In 
your ./configure script you could select what optional modules you want 
to build like --with-mod=all or --with-mod=gtif or these might be 
automatically figured out from the libraries installed or requested.

Then packaging would be based on the base package and and any optional 
format packages you want to install and each format package would have 
its own library dependencies. This would greatly simplify the growing 
tangle of system library and packaging dependencies and make things more 
modular from the users perspective.

Its an idea, maybe not well thought out, it probably involves a lot of 
work on someones part. It is offered in the hopes of making gdal/ogr 
better and more accessible from users and sysadmin's perspective.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Thanks,
   -Steve W