[PROJ] PROJ grid files CDN

[Nikolaos Ves]

Willing to help vs committed to help it is a big difference.

I support such an idea, but not through a voluntary base, maybe through
OSGeo somehow?

On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 15:03, Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co> wrote:

> All,
>
> A few days ago, I tweeted [1] looking for a CDN partner to help us
> incrementally distribute the shift files that PROJ uses. After that
> generated some connections from organizations willing to help, I'm now
> asking the community if there is support for such an idea.
>
> The current software approach PROJ uses to apply grid shifts works just
> fine, but it has one significant deficiency that can cause PROJ to generate
> "incorrect" results – the need for proper grid shift files. Incorrect
> results can happen due to missing shift data that users didn't know they
> needed to download and put in a magical directory. Some distributions do
> not ship full copies of the shift files due to their size, and new versions
> of the grid shift files are released at a different release cadence than
> the releases of distributions, the EPSG database, or PROJ itself.
>
> The current management of the grid shift files would be improved for many
> users by providing an optional online web service alternative for obtaining
> shift information. Some benefits of a web service approach include:
>
> * users no longer have to manually fetch grid files and place them in
> PROJ_LIB
> * full and accurate capability of the software would no longer require GBs
> of grid shift files
> * the web service can manage and provide proper versioning for the shift
> files
> * cache build up of the grid files could happen lazily so users end up
> locally mirroring what they actually use
>
> I recognize that many do not want PROJ reaching out to a web service, and
> I would propose that the machinery to do this would be optionally compiled
> and optionally activated via environment variable or some similar
> mechanism. However, a significant portion of
> don't-even-know-they're-using-PROJ users could benefit from PROJ having the
> optional ability to do its best in application of grid shifts.
>
> Does the PROJ community support such an idea? How does management of grid
> shift data impact your ability to use PROJ, and what ideas do you have to
> help us improve it?  If the feedback on this proposal is generally
> positive, I will work with Even on writing an RFC of a proposed
> implementation.
>
> Howard
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/howardbutler/status/1171778886646022145?s=20
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