[osgeo4w-dev] proj refactoring, gdal17-ecw

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

Today I have refreshed and refactored the PROJ.4 package.  This includes
splitting the HPGN (HARN) datum shift grid files into a separate package
(proj-hpgn) and the other grid shift files (proj-datumgrid).  This is to
avoid these fairly large packages from having to be re-downloaded every
time the proj dll/exe package is updated. The grid shift files will
presumably change rarely.  The two grid shift package are dependencies
of proj and so will always be installed if proj is.

I also introduced a new proj-vdatum vertical datum grid shift package which
is very large (40MB or so).  It is used by PROJ, but due to it's size, and
the relative rarity of use I have not made it a dependency of proj.  It will
need to be installed specifically by the user.

Today I also addressed the request for a gdal17-ecw plugin package.  To do
this I had to update the GDAL ECW driver to work with the ECW SDK
currently available from Erdas (4.1 20100920), and backported those changes
to 1.7.  Note that the most recent Erdas SDK is read-only, so it is not
possible to use the gdal17-ecw plugin to produce ECW or JPEG2000 files.

The new package page discussed the steps to download the sdk from Erdas
which each end user will need to do.  There is also now an emailed password
to install the SDK and I believe the terms of the agreement are different so
caution should be used reviewing the use agreement.

   http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/wiki/pkg-gdal17-ecw

I will note the plugin is built with VS2008 while GDAL 1.7 itself is built
with VS2003.  This is a somewhat dangerous mixture, but I didn't have any
issues in my simple local testing.  I now have a virtual machine setup
with VS2008 and I hope to migrate to using it for GDAL 1.8 and other
packages as appropriate.  I believe the msvcrt package already includes
the runtime components for VS2008.

Tonight and tomorrow I also plan to refresh the libgeotiff, and gdal-dev
packages.  If anything unusual comes out of those efforts, I'll notify
this list.

Best regards,
-- 
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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