[pdal] Self introduction for Paul Schrum (GSoC student)

[Howard Butler]

> On May 22, 2017, at 6:51 PM, Paul Schrum <paul.schrum at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello everybody.  I am a Google Summer of Code student.  My project this summer is to improve GRASS GIS's interaction with and use of PDAL for importing and exporting point cloud data, and maybe a little more if time permits.  See here for a little more info.

This sounds great!

> I was just now able to build PDAL from source on my machine (a PC running Oracle VirtualBox - Ubuntu).  My next tasks are to complete and publish my project wiki page, get to where I can link GRASS to PDAL, and get to where I can debug in an IDE.  (I am planning to use qtcreater.)

PDAL's build configuration settings for Ubuntu are all used heavily in its Docker configuration. Find out more at https://www.pdal.io/development/docker.html https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/blob/master/scripts/docker/Dockerfile and https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/blob/master/scripts/docker/dependencies/Dockerfile

> I don't have any questions at the moment, but I am sure I will soon.

As I mentioned in the ticket [1], I would suggest exploring the PipelineExecutor class once you get your development environment going. After you get that scenario working, your extension might internally provide some basic pipelines for people to use (say one for sampling, one for ground, etc.) and you can allow them to input data with option overrides. Next work after that would be to explore the streaming stuff that the PipelineKernel can provide and look to enhance PipelineExecutor to be able to do that. PDAL's one-at-a-time mode will behave much like the GRASS/libLAS ingest did.

Hope this helps, and I look forward to better PDAL+GRASS integration.

Howard 

[1] https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/2732#comment:15