[Qgis-user] building gdal for mrsid

[Don Harter]

     I was able to build gdal 3.9.0 with much difficulty.  I learned 
something about docker files and cmake.  I was able to use checkinstall 
some but not with the final install.  There was something about the 
installation that checkinstall did not pick up on.  I found the gdal 
installation tree in /tmp.  I made a tar file of that to use with 
alien.  However someone decided that you cannot have an absolute path in 
a tar file.  I got one in there using the "--transform=EXPRESSION," 
parameter of the tar command. However when I ran alien it complained 
about the beginning "/" of the file name.  Anyways once I installed it; 
it was incompatible with qgis, and did not have the correct version of 
libgdal.

     So then I gave up on that and downloaded the same version of gdal 
as the packages that were available from the repositories.(3.3.4)  I 
used git to get the source code.  I later found a web page that had it 
in a tar file.  The installation is different for this lower version of 
gdal; it uses autotools.  The documention for the installation did not 
match up with the files. I was supposed to run ./configure but there was 
not a configure file.  So then I ran autogen.sh to generate configure.  
I then ran configure and "configure --help to make sure that I had mrsid 
built in the new gdal.  I had to try until I got it pointed to its 
location.  Then I ran make. Finally  I ran "sudo checkinstall 
--install=no --pkgname=gdal --pkgversion=3.4.3 
--provides=gdal-bin,libgdal30,libgdal-dev  make install"  I had a .deb 
package now and used sudo dpkg -i to install it.  But when I started  
qgis it said that a plugin was missing.  Searching the net I found out 
that python3-gdal package was not installed.  I tried to install it, but 
it would not install because of the conflicts and required versions.  I 
thought that I had fixed that when I specified some of that with the 
checkinstall command.  Info on the gdal package though shows such a 
dependency.  You can't force the install with apt, but with dpkg you can 
--force-all. the satisfy clause did not seem to work.  But dpkg only 
uses .deb files on installation.  So I went to the ubuntu repository and 
downloaded the appropriate .deb file.  I then force installed it. qgis 
appears to be running again with no missing layers, and mr sid works 
also.  It makes me mad that I had to spend all that time, because of 
some government agency using proprietary algorithms and with a probable 
conflict of interest.