[postgis-users] The EWKB/EWKT specs should be part of the PostGIS manual

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Ben Harper wrote:

> Sorry to rant about an open source product that's free,
> 
> But the EWKB/EWKT specs should really be included in the PostGIS manual.
> Only after a fair amount of mistrial did I discover this:
> 
> http://postgis.refractions.net/pipermail/postgis-devel/2004-December/000710.html
> 
> If that was part of the manual, it would have saved me a fair amount
> of confusion.

Thanks for the feedback. I probably speak for the majority of the 
PostGIS team in that we are so familiar with the code that perhaps 
things that are obvious to us aren't necessarily obvious to the users. 
Most of our focus is on preparing for the 1.4 release at the moment, so 
if you could contribute a patch then it would be gratefully accepted.

> Additionally, the PostGIS manual claims that "every valid WKB/WKT is a
> valid EWKB/EWKT" but I find this to be untrue.
> Specifically, if I construct a WKB PointZ geometry, as specified by
> http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=18241
> and I try to read it via GeomFromEWKB(), I get garbage (A COMPOUND
> CURVE is what comes out).
> The docs should be updated to reflect this fact, or the WKB parser
> should support this part of the spec.

Hmmm this smells like a bug. Are you working with 1.4 or 1.3? Can you 
post a specific test case for us to look at?


Many thanks,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
Sirius Corporation plc - control through freedom
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