[postgis-devel] Proposal: drop support for libproj < 6.1 in PostGIS 3.3.0

[Even Rouault]

> Not ubuntu but as proj packager for pkgsrc, I got stuck at 6.3.2.  Not
> for a good reason, but moving beyond that gets into dealing with the
> proj CDN and a different format of proj data.  Part of the issue is that
> proj people think it's reasonable to download on the fly and manage
> permissions of who can put downloaded stuff where, and packaging people,
> not so much.
That's a rather oriented way of presenting things:

- Networking mode is opt-in (at build time, and at runtime). You can 
still use good old files on your local disk.

- You can use still old .gtx/.gsb grids of past proj-datumgrid packages.

- The PROJ database has aliases for those old names and the new GeoTIFF 
files, at leat for all grids we knew before the transition to GeoTIFF 
files, and the aliasing work in both direction: if a user refers to a 
.gtx/.gsb grid and they have instead the corresponding geotiff file it 
will be used. So the transition should be smooth.

- Building PROJ 7 and above shouldn't be a big deal if you already build 
GDAL as it has a subset of its dependencies (curl, geotiff, sqlite3).

I can understand that the amount of grid data we have collected in 
recent years can be a problem from a packaging point of view, but that's 
a problem of "rich people" as one say. As a least effort, you can still 
provide the good old proj-datumgrid-1.8 package of 6.3 MB and things 
will still work as before, even if not fully optimal in terms of what is 
possible.

End of digression.

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