[pdal] GSoC Weekly Report, Week 2, from Paul Schrum

[Paul Schrum]

Weekly Report for Paul Schrum for Week 2 (the week ending 6/9/2017)

Project: Integration Of PDAL into GRASS GIS



1. What did you get done this week?



- Found a suitable test .las dataset and ran pdal on it from a unix command
line just to view info and prove to myself that everything works as
expected.  I also ran v.in.lidar on this dataset, again just to be sure it
works as expected.



- Got a good understanding of how writing to a new VectorMap works in GRASS
by studying v.in.ascii and v.in.lidar.



- Added reference to pdal-config to my local build environment and got it
to build okay.  Doing this caused make to attempt to build v.in.pdal.  See
the next bullet item for more on this.



- I did not previously realize that when I was building GRASS from source,
it was not trying to build v.in.pdal, though the source is part of the
Subversion repo.  So with my mentor’s help I brought v.in.pdal into the
build process on my local machine.  This triggered build errors, which is
expected to happen.  This is the state of the code as I prepare this report.



- Studied PDAL documentation (especially https://www.pdal.io/pipeline.html)
and started to develop a coding approach and plan which will utilize
Pipelines.  There will be some common operations for which v.in.pdal will
provide the pipeline json string internally so the GRASS end user does not
have to concern themselves with it.  There will also be a way in GRASS for
end users to provide their own pipeline json file if they prefer.  Much of
this comes from recommendations by Howard Butler on the PDAL mailing list
and in the primary GRASS enhancement ticket for this project.



- Discussed this approach with my mentor and we talked about a few more
issues beyond just the pipeline approach.



- Added v.in.pdal to a new public github repository.  (
https://github.ncsu.edu/ptschrum/v_in_pdal)  As of 6/9/2017 this repository
is just a copy of what is in the main svn repo for v.in.pdal.  All changes
will be pushed from my local machine to the github repository.



2. What do you plan on doing next week?

- Write classes and procedural code to make a simple and basic use case
work via v.in.pdal.



- This includes implementing the pipeline approach as described above.  It
also entails eliminating rotted API function calls and struct references.  Much
of the existing code base will be rewritten.  So part of this task will be
assessing what existing code to retain and what to rework.



- Implement the GRASS testing framework using the sample dataset and add
some foundational unit test runs.



- Paul’s vacation begins Friday, 16 June.  That day and part of the
Thursday before I will not be able to work on the project.  Vacation lasts
until Monday 26 June.  Tuesday may be a slow day as well.  I will continue
to post weekly updates, but they will not have much in them.





3. Are you blocked on anything?

No.
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