[pdal] Obtaining "stats" without reading points

[Gerlek, Michael]

Thinking this over on the way in this morning, I think I actually have a valid use case in my own work for “approximate” metadata. I wouldn’t do any serious computation based on them, but I could use them for display purposes and “estimating” the sizes of things.

Specifically, it would be nice if in there was a way to say getApproxNumPoints() and getApproxBBox(). These values would be set by the individual readers at initialization time, before reading any points, if the reader thinks it might have something useful to contribute. The user would explicitly choose to read these values or not, and if he does so, he does so with the understanding that they may not be correct.

For the unupdated-las-header problem I mentioned earlier, this would be just fine.

Hmmm….

-mpg