[osgeo4w-dev] gdal-dev, libtiff and libgeotiff upgraded

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I have updated the gdal-dev, libtiff, and libgeotiff packages from the
respective trunks' and CVS heads.

The gdal-dev package is now built with VC9 (Visual Studio 2008 Express).
This greatest challenge with this proved to be mixups with alloc/free
between the GDAL GeoTIFF driver's heap, and the libgeotiff heap since
GDAL is built against the VC9 runtime/heap and libgeotiff is built against
the VC7.1 runtime/heap.  The fixes are back in GDAL trunk.  This took
*way* too much time for me to track down, isolate and fix but hopefully
we are good till next time folks fiddle with the gt_wkt_srs.cpp code
without realizing this issue.

There seems to be no problem with building GDAL and it's python bindings
with VC9 against the same Python we using VC7.1 with before.  Somehow I
thought there was an issue - but apparently not.  I did have to take care
to embed manifests.

Once GDAL 1.8 is released I plan to build a gdal18 package using VC9
as a step towards reducing my dependence VC7.1 which is now antique,
and not easily available to others.  At that point I'm also hoping
we can migrate most packages using GDAL to GDAL 1.8, to try and get out
of the situation now where the default is ancient (1.5) and some packages
(MapServer, QGIS) have moved to somewhat newer GDALs.  This puts us in
the ugly situation where people may end up having to install plugins for
several versions of GDAL instead of install-once, use everywhere applying
as I would like.

I tried to package, and utilize the openjpeg jpeg2000 library but got
caught up in some details and put it off.  But this is likely our best
hope for jpeg2000 read/write support that works well for large images
without depending on proprietary libraries.

As always, please let me know if the upgrades cause problems.

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