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

[Sandro Santilli]

I shall note that GEOS-3.5.0 was not even released.
All I can suggest is to implement a WARNING message at ./configure time
that lists the cherries you'd be missing by not using GEOS-3.5.0,
but would not make the configure fail otherwise.

--strk;

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 04:09:51AM -0400, Paragon Corporation wrote:
> 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