[PROJ] Future maintainance releases

[Bas Couwenberg]

On 2019-10-30 09:30, Even Rouault wrote:
>> Even, what other important dependencies are still lagging behind?
> 
> No idea, but Bas previous message makes me believe that seing PROJ 7 
> (without
> proj_api.h) deployed would take even more time than PROJ 6...

In Debian we're still in the middle of migrating to PROJ 6, we've passed 
the first step and have PROJ 6.2.0 in unstable and several packages have 
been updated which include support for proj.h, others have been updated 
to define ACCEPT_USE_OF_DEPRECATED_PROJ_API_H.

GDAL 3 is the next big step, which is currently blocked by the removal 
of the Python 2 support from the package.

The proj.h-adoption-status wiki has been updated as much as possible and 
provides a reasonably good overview where projects stand.

Projects that don't have a release with support for proj.h yet include 
(but are not limited to):

  * Cartopy
  * libosmium
  * libspatialite
  * Mapnik
  * MapServer (should gain that support soon)
  * QMapShack

In Debian there are many reverse dependencies of libspatialite and (old 
versions of) VTK which will delay the adoption of PROJ 7 or will have to 
be removed from testing to unblock the transition.

The next Debian stable release, bullseye, (in Q3/Q4 2021 probably) will 
almost certainly ship with PROJ 6.x due to the above.

During the development cycle for the subsequent release, bookworm, we'll 
focus on migrating to PROJ 7 and remove everthing that blocks it. Having 
to remove support for SpatiaLite if that still won't have a release by 
that time (which unfortunately seems likely) won't be good for users, 
but it's a necessary evil to unblock progress. Just like breaking some 
packages which still require python-gdal is.

Kind Regards,

Bas