[pdal] Pointcloud writer not available

[Howard Butler]

> On Aug 3, 2016, at 10:59 AM, Jean-Francois Prieur <jfprieur at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, I figured from the previous discussions that a pathing issue is occuring.
> 
> We love docker and work with it, the only issue I have to research is that we use Python scripts to call pdal via osgeo command line to insert point clouds in our database using pgpointcloud writer. 
> 
> We work in precision forestry so we have software that segments tree crowns from lidar data. We then extract the point cloud for each individual tree using the segmented vector tree crown shapes  Many metrics and features are calculated and tagged to the crown (this is what the Python script that creates the PDAL pipeline does) and then injected into the postgres database, so they can be found in the database later.
> 
> We have not found a way (yet!) to interface via Docker the same way eg. Call a pdal command line via docker from a Python script.

It should be possible and straightforward to do this. I know some on this list are doing exactly that (running pdal docker containers and interacting with data on the host via mapped volumes), though they are using Linux as the Docker host.  The PDAL Workshop on the website demonstrates how to run PDAL commands on Windows hosts in a number of scenarios.

Going forward, the current PDAL development team is not likely to keep Windows builds via OSGeo4W on par with the public Docker builds. The Docker builds are automatically generated as new commits are made to the current maintenance branch (right now this is 1.2-maintenance and the pdal/pdal:1.2 image).

However, PDAL's test suite is built and run on Windows with most commits to the repository, and a zip file of the resulting successful build against current OSGeo4W64 is available for you to hand jam from https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdal/osgeo4w/pdal.zip It's not tied to specific releases, and it is bound to whatever was current for OSGeo4W64 when the build was made, but some may find it useful.

Howard