[Qgis-developer] geos c api note

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Martin,

On Wed, 13. Aug 2008 at 17:05:44 +0530, Martin Dobias wrote:
> i'd like to say that in my opinion it would cause pain to switch to
> geos c api now before 1.0 release. there are more reasons:

> - we shouldn't force users to use some very new version of geos

Is that really a big issue?  We need tons of dependencies.  I don't
think using a current GEOS version is going to be a significant extra
effort for now, if someone is willing to go though the hassle of
building QGIS at all.

And in the long run using the C-API will enable us to use more
prepackaged binaries.


> - may bring new bugs

That's true for almost every change.


> - this is my biggest concern - we'd like to do many changes in
> geometry handling after 1.0 release and geos c api doesn't have
> support of many features that we will need so that might result in
> going back to geos c++ api.

Apparently the C++ API is not the recommended interface (see
http://download.osgeo.org/geos/doxygen/).  Note: on Windows there ure
only DLLs for the C-API.  Unless you use the static library there is no
available C++-API at all.

So I think we should target the C-API and extend it if necessary in
cooperation with the geos folks.


Jürgen

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