[osgeo4w-dev] GDAL 1.8.0 - New Baseline for GDAL in OSGeo4W

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

GDAL/OGR 1.8 has been released, and I'd like to make it the new
baseline GDAL for OSGeo4W.  Towards that end I propose the following:

1) The "gdal" package, now based on GDAL 1.5 will be upgraded to GDAL 1.8,
as opposed to introducing a new "gdal18" package as was done for 1.6 and 1.7.

2) A new "gdal15dll" package will be introduced which will only contain the
GDAL 1.5 DLL from the existing GDAL package.  It will be made a requirement
of the "gdal" package for now.  This is intended to ensure that all
applications which current link against GDAL 1.5 will still have the
GDAL15.DLL and should keep working fine.

3) The gdal-autotest, gdal-ecw, gdal-grass, gdal-java, gdal-mrsid,
gdal-python, gdal-oracle10g, gdal-sde90, gdal-sde91, and gdal-sde
packages will all be upgraded to GDAL 1.8 or removed where this is
not practical (possibly some of the SDE packages).

4) I will add logic to the plugin loader for GDAL 1.8 to keep plugins in
a version dependent location so we can avoid conflicts where different
versions of GDAL might try to load the same plugins.  I believe the
net result will be that 1.8 plugins will live in
C:\OSGeo4W\bin\gdalplugins\1.8 instead of C:\OSGeo4W\bin\gdalplugins

A few things to keep in mind:

  o When the plugin packages like gdal-mrsid are upgraded to 1.8, old
    applications still built against GDAL 1.5 will no longer have access
    to the plugins.

  o After this transition packages built on gdal should rebuild as soon
    as is convenient so they are using the GDAL18.DLL and will have access
    to plugins again.  However, there should be no dire problems if this
    takes a while.

  o It may take me a while to work the quirks out of this significant
    a transition which I intend to do in the "test" context over the next
    few days.  To this end I would appreciate folks not doing the
    OSGeo4W "Promote" operation to move the test setup.ini file over the
    production one.  I have backed up the current setup.ini file in
    /osgeo/download/osgeo4w/backup just in case it does happen so we can
    restore.

I'm interested in feedback on the this plan though I'm convinced enough
that there are no serious problems with it that I am planning to go ahead
as long as I don't hear any showstoppers.

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