[postgis-devel] Vote on Merging postgis and raster installs andwhen

[Paul Ramsey]

\On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 2:55 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk> wrote:
> On 03/01/12 19:54, Paul Ramsey wrote:
>
>> I think GDAL should be mandatory, but older GEOS should be OK (we've
>> gone to the trouble of stubbing those functions for a reason,
>> presumably. A configure WARNING makes sense, so at least ignorance
>> won't be an excuse.
>
> Hmmm but doesn't this undermine your earlier argument about keeping
> everything the same? The reason I spent time making PROJ/GEOS mandatory was
> because of the many issues we had stemmed from developers having different
> combinations of libraries installed - so for example I could commit a patch
> against PostGIS and have it pass regression without having PROJ installed
> locally, whereas someone else with PROJ could have it fail regression
> because it was never checked on my system.
>
> I'd much prefer to bump the minimum version of GEOS to give both users and
> developers a consistent experience rather than to keep stubbing functions
> against various different versions :(

Yes it does undermine it, but it's not quite the same argument. If we
were talking about versioning liblwgeom and installing it separately
and then allowing PostGIS to work against different versions of that
(and by gum if we didn't have that conversation, almost made me blow
my brains out) then it would be the same argument.  GEOS is a separate
project and it's not unreasonable to expect people will have different
versions of it floating around and to maintain at least a little
backward compatibility to allow installation flexibility for folks.
The grey area is how *much* backward compatibility.

I'll note that as of now, logic dictates that we have *no* backward
compatibility, because (a) topology should be a default build
component and (b) topology requires GEOS >= 3.3.2 (Arg!!! minor
version requirement!) and (c) that version of GEOS isn't even released
yet!

Sandro, is there anything preventing us popping out a minor GEOS
release in short order so that when PostGIS 2alpha comes out it's not
depending on an unreleased library?

p.