[postgis-devel] PSC vote Request: Make Geos 3.5 the default in PostGIS 2.2

[Paragon Corporation]

I suppose it would be mean to completely block compiling PostGIS 2.2 against
a geos lower than 3.5, however, how about a compromise:

We make GEOS 3.5 the default and if someone wants to compile with a lower
GEOS, then they need to pass in an extra parameter to do this.

Why do I want to make GEOS 3.5 the default and make it a deliberate decision
to compile with lower GEOS

We have 2  great functions coming in PostGIS 2.2 that rely on GEOS 3.5 and
they've been things people have been asking for as far back as I can
remember in PostGIS history.

1) ST_ClipByBox -  which does fast clipping by boxes
2) it's sibling ST_SubDivide -- which does fast clipping optimizing for
number of vertices per clip.

Strk -- I wanted to add Voronoi here, but guess we aren't going to have that
for 2.2.



-- Anyway speaking as a package maintainer, and knowing how I think which I
think is how a lot of package maintainer's think, if I don't know a project,
I often build against the previous stable minor version (Not most recent
stable)
And I don't have the patience to read little friendly developer fineprints
("Hey you know you get more with 3.5?") unless it halts my compilation.

That said -- if all package maintainers think like me, which I think many
do, we'll have a lot of users stuck with GEOS 3.4 in PostGIS 2.2 if there
isn't a non-ignorable warning that strongly urges them to build with
something higher.



Thanks,
Regina