[pdal] PDAL 1.2 Released

[Howard Butler]

All,

http://www.pdal.io/download.html 

It is my pleasure to announce the release of PDAL 1.2.0.  A maintenance branch, 1.2-maintenance, is now available to track bug fixes on the release. Ongoing development will continue on the master branch. 

Thank you for your bug reports, pull requests, testing, and code contributions.

Howard

Changes of Note:

- The GEOS library is now required to build PDAL.  In earlier versions it was
  an optional component.
- Boost is no longer a required component.  Unless you are building plugins
  that require boost (notably PCL and Geowave), you no longer will need
  boost installed on your system to build or run PDAL.
- PDAL now builds on Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.
- The PipelineReader class has been removed and its functionality has been
  merged into PipelineManager.
- Plugin libraries now support Linux versioning.
- Naming changes have been made to allow packaging with the Debian release.
- filters.height now uses the dimension 'HeightAboveGround' instead of a
  dimension named 'Height' to be compatible with the filters.heightaboveground.
- Option names no longer contain lowercase characters.
- PDAL now works with GDAL version 1.9 and later.
- Stages created with the StageFactory are now owned by the factory.
- filters.dartthrowing has been renamed filters.dartsample
- 'pipeline-serialization' now produces JSON output instead of XML.

Enhancements:

- Pipelines may now be specified using a JSON syntax.  XML syntax is still
  supported but users should switch to JSON when possible as the XML support
  will be removed in a future version.
- PDAL now can be built into a Docker container.
- Many stages now support "streaming," which allows control of the number
  of points stored in memory during processing.  See
  Stage::execute(StreamPointTable&) for more information.
- A basic text reader has been added.
- Added support for the dimension 'ClassFlags' in readers.las.
- The derivative writer can now produce output for multiple primitive types
  with a single execution.
- 'pdal info' now provides bounding box output instead of a more refined
  boundary when the hexbin plugin isn't found.
- Added 'pdal density' to provide a command-line interface to the
  filters.hexbin density calcuations.
- The icebridge reader can now load an associated metadata file.  The reader
  also now marks the associated coordinate system as WGS84.
- The stats filter now emits bounding box information in native and WGS84
  projections.
- PDAL command-line programs now (generally) check their argument lists for
  correctness and report syntax errors.
- 'pdal info' now provides spatial reference attributes in addition to
  the actual well-known text.
- Geometry can now be specified as GeoJSON as well as well-known-text in
  most contexts.  Geometry optionally provides Z-dimension output.
- Stage and plugin creation is now thread-safe (NOTE: Most of PDAL is
  NOT thread-safe, so tread carefully).
- Many, many documentation enhancements.

Fixes:

- A bug in generating PCIDs when with multiple simultaneous PDAL executions
  to the same Postgres database has been fixed.
- Fixed a bug in generated SQL delete statements when certain table names
  were used in the writers.postgres driver.
- Properly escape quotes when generating JSON output.
- Fix an off-by-one error when writing data with the derivative writer that
  could lead to a crash.
- Fixed a depedency error during builds that could lead to a failure to
  properly load Python extensions on Linux.
- Fixed a bug where passing certain options to 'pdal info' could be handled
  in ambiguous ways.
- Fixed bugs in the reading of raster data using readers.gdal.
- Fixed population of the AIMIDB and ACFTB attributes in writers.nitf.
- Corrected the parsing of some dimension names in filters.colorization.
- Fixed a potential truncation in the GlobalEncoding dimension of readers.las.

See more in GitHub https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/issues?q=milestone%3A1.2+is%3Aclosed