GDAL/OGR 1.2.6 Released

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I am pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.2.6.  The new
release can be downloaded from:

  http://www.gdal.org/dl/gdal-1.2.6.tar.tz
  http://www.gdal.org/dl/gdal126.zip

Signficant improvements and changes in this release are mentioned
in the NEWS entries below.


GDAL 1.2.6 - Overview of Changes
--------------------------------

gdal_translate:
 - Added -sds switch to copy all subdatasets.

gdalwarp:
 - Added Thin Plate Spline support (-tps switch).

GDALRasterBand:
 - Now uses two level block cache allowing efficient access to files
   with a very large number of tiles.
 - Added support for YCbCr color space for raster band color interpretations.
 - Added AdviseRead() method - currently only used by ECW driver and OGDI
   drivers.

ILWIS Driver:
 - New driver for the raster format of the ILWIS software.

ECW Driver:
 - Updated to use ECW SDK 3.1 (older ECW SDK no longer supported!)

ECWJP2 Driver:
 - Added JPEG2000 support driver based on ECW/JPEG2000 SDK with a variety
   of features.

NITF Driver:
 - Added support for reading *and* writing JPEG2000 compressed NITF files
   using the ECW/JPEG2000 SDK.
 - Added ICHIPB support.

HDF Driver:
 - Add support for georeferencing from some additional metadata formats.
 - Fixed bug with multi-band HDF-EOS datasets.

MrSID Driver:
 - Driver can now be built as a plugin on win32.
 - Split out MrSID 3.x SDK support - not readily buildable now.
 - Implemented accelerated IO cases for MrSID 4.x SDK.
 - Support for writing MrSID files added (improved?)

Imagine Driver:
 - Fixed bug reading some large multiband Imagine files.
 - Added support for writing compressed files.

Win32 Builds:
 - Added versioning information to GDAL DLL.

L1B Driver:
 - Only return a reduced grid of control points.

IDA (WinDisp4) Driver:
 - New read/write driver for the Image Display and Analysis raster format
   used by WinDisp 4.

NDF (NLAPS) Driver:
 - Added NDF/NLAPS read driver for version 1 and 2.

MSG Driver:
 - Added support for the Metosat Second Generation raw file format.

GTiff Driver:
 - Added support for offset/scale being saved and loaded (special metadata).
 - Added Cylindrical Equal Area.
 - Added PROFILE creation option to limit extra tags.

PNG Driver:
 - Updated internal code for libpng to libpng 1.2.8.


OGR 1.2.6 - Overview of Changes
-------------------------------

OGRSFDriverRegistrar:
 - Added support for autoloading plugin drivers from ogr_<driver>.so.

ogr.py:
 - Geometry, and Feature now take care of their own reference counting and
   will delete themselves when unreferenced.  Care must still be taken to
   unreference all features before destroying the corresponding
   layer/datasource.
 - ogr.Feature fields can now be fetched and set directly as attributes.
 - Geometry contructor can now take various formats (wkt, gml, and wkb).
 - Added docstrings.
 - Added better __str__ methods on several objects.
 - Various other improvements.

OGRLayer:
 - Re-wrote generic spatial search support to be faster in case of rectangular
   filters.
 - Intersects() method now really uses GEOS.  This also affects all OGR
   layer spatial filtering (with non-rectangular filters).
 - Added SetNextByIndex() method on OGRLayer.

OGRSpatialReference:
 - Automatically generate +towgs84 from EPSG tables when translating to
   PROJ.4 if available and TOWGS84 not specified in source WKT.
 - Updated GML CRS translation to follow OGC 05-011 more closely.  Still
   incomplete but operational for some projections.
 - Added support for FIPSZONE State Plane processing for old ESRI .prjs.
 - Added Goode Homolosine support.
 - Added GEOS (Geostationary Satellite) support.

OCI (Oracle) Driver:
 - Added GEOMETRY_NAME creation option to control the name of the field to
   hold the geometry.

PostGIS Driver:
 - Fixed some problems with truncation for integer and float list fields.

Shapefile Driver:
 - Added support for MapServer style spatial index (.qix).

GML Driver:
 - Improved support for 3L0 (GML 3 - Level 0 profile) reading and writing.
   On read we can now use the .xsd instead of needing to build a .gfs file.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent