[pdal] Pointcloud writer not available

[Howard Butler]

> On Aug 3, 2016, at 10:38 AM, Jean-Francois Prieur <jfprieur at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Just got a new machine for work, I downloaded the latest 64-bit osgeo4w installer and installed my usual suite of stuff (PDAL, PCL, QGIS, etc) and all dependencies. For some reason, when I type pdal --drivers in the osgeo4w command line (using admin privileges), writers.pointcloud is missing. Other writers missing are nitf, p2g, pcd, pclvisualiser, sqlite. This was working for us previously, both machines have windows 7 and similar configurations.
> 
> Am I missing something obvious? pdal --version gives 1.1.0 (git-version: 64ca76) on both machines.
> 
> I tried searching and found things related to this problem (namely related to paths) but this used to work flawlessly (older machine was installed in early 2016) and now doesn`t which is puzzling.

The most likely issue is PDAL_DRIVER_PATH isn't set, or it isn't pointing at C:\osgeo4w64\bin

Note that we aren't really keeping the Windows binaries up-to-date anymore because of the effort required to do so. The best way to use PDAL on Windows with the most up-to-date software (without building it yourself) is to use the Docker builds. This especially true now that Docker on Windows is rapidly improving.

See the Quickstart http://www.pdal.io/quickstart.html and Workshop Installation documents http://www.pdal.io/workshop/docker.html for background on how to get going with it.

Howard