[Xastir] Help needed with proj library compatibility

[Lee Bengston]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 10:03 AM Tom Russo <russo at bogodyn.org> wrote:

> There is a simpler way for me to address this issue, but I need some input
> from the Xastir user community.
>
> The easiest possible way to address this is to remove GDAL and OGR support
> from
> Xastir altogether.  That would remove the need to have a copy of
> GTIFProj4FromLatLong in map_tif at all (because that copy exists SOLELY to
> deconflict libgeotiff and libgdal's two versions of the same function),
> and I
> believe it would have minimal impact on any existing users.
>
> GDAL and OGR support was added to Xastir back around 2005, with the intent
> of
> using its vast capability to support many more map types than had
> previously
> been supported in Xastir.  But this support never really reached its
> potential,
> and almost no GDAL raster support ever got written.  Only OGR vector map
> support was developed, and it never reached the level of support that the
> completely separate shapelib code had --- that is, while the shapelib
> driver allows you to control Xastir's rendering of shapefiles using
> DBFAWK,
> you can't control Xastir's rendering of OGR-supported vector files
> except by hand-editing the map_ogr.c file and hacking in special purpose
> code.
>
> I do not believe *anybody* actually uses these obscure map types in Xastir,
> and some of them are not even available anymore (such as the old
> topological
> format TIGER/LINE data or the SDTS files from USGS).  The complete list of
> data types that *could* be rendered wtih OGR in the existing code are:
>    .ddf   USGS SDTS vector files
>    .rt1   US Census Tiger/Line
>    .s57   International Hydrographic Organization S-57 files
>    .tab   ]
>    .mid   ]  MapINFO files
>    .mif   ]
>    .dgn   Microstation DGN format
>
> Wow, I used Microstation back in the early 90's at work. Definitely don't
use any of the files above with Xastir.


> Many other map types *could* have been implemented, but only these were.
>
> So the question is, is anyone actually using any of these map types in
> their
> Xastir work, or is the GDAL/OGR code in fact just code bloat that is
> causing
> problems now?
>
> Removing the GDAL/OGR code and the handful of obsolete shapelib "contrib"
> programs that use proj.4 would completely solve the future incompatibility
> with the proj library.
>
> Note that the programs that come with gdal are still all very useful, but
> are not directly used by Xastir.  If you have been using tools like
> gdalwarp
> or ogr2ogr to convert map data into formats that Xastir understands
> natively,
> that would remain the best approach and would not be impacted if I were to
> remove all GDAL/OGR support from Xastir.
>

Yes, I use gdalwarp but do not need any of the functionality of the
GDAL/OGR code that was implemented in Xastir.
Lee - K5DAT


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