[osgeo4w-dev] upgrading libspatialite

[a.furieri at lqt.it]

Hi all,

this is a quick abstract of my personal tests and
experiments (I'm the main developer and maintainer
of the SpatiaLite project) about upgrading OSGeo4W
to a more recent version of this library:

A) libspatialite itself
-----------------------
the current version distributed by OSGeo4W is 3.0.1
which is not able to access any DB-file created using
any recent version of the library (>= 4.0.0), and this
is particularly annoying for many QGIS users.
the most obvious candidate to be included into OSGeo4W
as a fresher replacement is the very recent 4.1.1
(released on 2013-06-29)
please note: 4.1.1 simply is a minor bugfixing release
resolving few issues emerged in both 4.0.0 and 4.1.0


other libraries required by libspatialite as external
dependencies:

B) freexl
---------
the current version distributed by OSGeo4W is 1.0.0b
upgrading to the most recent 1.0.0e is strongly suggested;
this latest version resolved few bugs and introduced
several stability enhancements.
Warning: freexl is a required dependency for GDAL as well;
a dangerous issue could probably arise here.
(I'll explain this issue in more depth on a separate thread)

C) libsqlite3
-------------
currently supported version is 3.7.10 (released on 2012-01-16);
the most recent version is 3.7.17 (released on 2013-05-20).
as a general rule, frequently updating libsqlite3 to the
most recent version available seems to be the better and safest
long term strategy to be adopted by OSGeo4W.
sqlite3 has a tremendous reputation for being a very stable
library: not a single API/ABI was changed or removed during many
long years (many new ones were obviously added during this time).
new versions implementing interesting cool features are regularly
released every two months, and whenever a critical bug is detected
a new updated bugfixing version will be quickly released.
so standing things, continuing to deploy older versions of
libsqlite3 simply means to ignore any bugfix applied in the
meanwhile.

D) libxml2
----------
the current version shipped by OSGeo4W is 2.6.23 which
really is very old (released on 2006-01-05); the most
recent version available is 2.9.1 (released on 2012-04-19)
it's surely interesting to note that all old versions of
libxml2 were completely unable to successfully validate
any complex XML schema (e.g. as the ones required by
ISO19115/INSPIRE metadata documents).
all new versions > 2.8.x brilliantly resolve this issue.
and it should be noted that libxml2 sources directly
include a very effective build script supporting MSVC
in an absolutely smooth way.

any comments ?

bye Sandro

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