[pdal] lazperf requirement for PDAL 2.4+

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 10/4/21 2:29 PM, James Klassen wrote:
> It seems important for the other GIS packages to have pdal packaged (especially with the upcoming QGIS point cloud work). It also seems like it is important to have it packaged for OSGeo Live. 

Very true.

I initially packaged pdal because grass needed an alternative for
liblas, I was more willing to maintain packages I don't actually use
back then.

Much more time was spent to get laszip into Debian, which will now only
be used in the bullseye stable release. It was definitely not worth that
much effort.

> However, while I mostly run Debian stable, I build/install multiple versions of pdal, lazperf, gdal, QGIS, CloudCompare, et al. from source because the packaged versions usually aren’t up to date with what I need (and I like building from source because it helps when I need to debug/modify code).

Libraries with rdepds like pdal, and specifically ones with many like
gdal, are not very suited for backports. So if you need something newer
than what's in Debian stable, you either need to maintain backport for
bunch of packages or build them all from source.

> I haven’t packaged anything for Debian before.  I have built some of my own DEBs, but I just did the bare minimum to get something that would install. I haven’t gone through any of the community process, nor cared if the packages pass lint.  Lazperf itself seems like a pretty easy place to start (few dependencies, well behaved cmake, etc).  How much ongoing effort would be required to maintain a package such as lazperf?  

Packaging for Debian differs from packaging for personal repos mostly in
that the copyright file needs to be properly maintained, tooling like
licensecheck helps greatly with that.

How much effort will be required to maintain lazperf is impossible to
predict. If the SONAME changes often, you'll need to coordinate
transitions often. If it doesn't, you'll mostly need to keep up with
bugreports and new upstream releases.

As someone who actually uses lazperf you're much better suited to help
maintain the package than someone like me who doesn't. I encourage you
to package laszip and maintain it with in the Debian GIS Team. Refer to
the team policy for the workflow documentation:

 https://debian-gis-team.pages.debian.net/policy/

Kind Regards,

Bas

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