[PROJ] Call for review on RFC 4 text: Remote access to grids and GeoTIFF grids

[Andrew Bell]

I wouldn't be true to form if I didn't express some skepticism in the value
of this change.

I don't quite understand the environment in which one would care about
700MB of data.  We live in an age where it's difficult to purchase a
storage device as small as 500GB, so minimizing an installation footprint
to avoid 700MB of data strikes me as a bit silly, especially when PROJ has
recently added a requirement for sqlite3.  If the issue is one of
packaging, it seems that there are other alternatives to a "fancy" solution
like this.  Could not the PROJ installation simply download the files from
some known source?  I'm sure there are other options as well.  Dynamic
fetching of data seems natural these days, but it's non-trivial.  Failures
can occur at many levels and these either need handling in the source code
or errors may be transferred to users who may well scratch their heads
about what's *not* working properly.  Personally, I'd much rather have a
failure/problem at installation-time than a run-time failure.  PROJ is, in
my mind, a core library for many users.  It should be as robust as
possible.  To meet that goal requires careful code.  Extra features require
more code, which requires more maintenance, review and necessarily
increases the likelihood of bugs.  Current maintainers may have time and
expertise to add this enhancement, but it's not clear to me that it's in
the long-term best interest of the basic functionality of the library.

On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 7:46 AM Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> As announced last week, you'll find a RFC describing two new capabilities,
> remote access to grids and a GeoTIFF-based format for grids, in
> https://github.com/OSGeo/PROJ/pull/1747
>
> You can get an (almost correct) preview of it by going through
>
> https://github.com/rouault/PROJ/blob/rfc4_remote_and_geotiff_grid/docs/source/community/rfc/rfc-4.rst
> (some links will not work in this preview: expected given that this
> rendering doesn't go through Sphinx)
>
> Even
>
> --
> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
> http://www.spatialys.com
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-- 
Andrew Bell
andrew.bell.ia at gmail.com
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