[PROJ] Patterson projection - supported?

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi list,

I'm curious as to the state of the "patterson" projections in proj.
https://proj.org/operations/projections/patterson.html suggests that
proj fully supports these projections, and the corresponding entries
are present in the proj db (ESRI 53079 and ESRI 54079)

Question 1:

If I run "projinfo -s EPSG:4326 -t ESRI:54079" I get a warning: "PROJ string:
Error when exporting to PROJ string: Unsupported conversion method: Patterson"

Does this mean that:
a. converting the coordinate operation between EPSG:4326 and
ESRI:54079 to a **proj** string is not supported
or
b. creating a coordinate operation for this transform isn't possible at all?

Question 2:

if I try to use gdal/proj master to transform a natural earth dataset
to ESRI:54079, using:
ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" output.shp ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp
-t_srs "ESRI:54079" I only get a bunch of "failed to reproject
feature" errors.

Is this expected? Or a bug somewhere along the way?

Nyall