[pdal] writers.gdal and P2G

[Howard Butler]

All,

As I mentioned in Twitter [1], Andrew has implemented a writers.gdal [2] in current master that replaces and significantly improves upon the functionality provided by points2grid. The new driver allows you to control the output to a GDAL-writeable raster, allows you to specify the dimension to interpolate, allows you to pass GDAL options, and it is significantly faster than PDAL's previous p2g usage. In exchange, writers.gdal can consume significant memory depending upon your configuration and how much data you are pushing into it. p2g also consumed plenty of memory, but it had its own memory paging system to try to manage that. The assumption with writers.gdal is your system can page memory more efficiently than a homespun implementation.

I would like to propose that we remove p2g in the upcoming PDAL 1.4 release, but I wanted to hear any feedback on that topic before doing so. Are you wed to p2g? Does it impact you greatly to switch to writers.gdal if we were to remove it?

Thanks,

Howard

[1] https://twitter.com/pointcloudpipe/status/788768713583448064
[2] https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/blob/master/doc/stages/writers.gdal.rst