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GDAL [1] Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic and ancient coral reef of a library and tool set but has a lot of inconsistencies in naming conventions and usage

GDAL [1] Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic and ancient coral reef of a library and tool set but has a lot of inconsistencies in naming conventions and usage (gdal_translate, gdalfinfo). Many geospatial professionals are not savvy enough to leverage it without it being wrapped by someone else like Esri. Windows power users typically install it with something like OSGeo4W [2], whose name I can never remember. Whenever I need it I spin up a Docker image for convenience. [1] https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal [2] https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/ https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/

perrygeo 1y ago
> inconsistencies You'll be interested in the changes in 3.11, a single `gdal` entrypoint with a modern CLI. https://gdal.org/en/stable/development/rfc/rfc104_gdal_cli.html https://gdal.org/en/stable/development/rfc/rfc104_gdal_cli.h... Installation is still a beast, mainly because it's one monolithic thing. It's a spatial analysis library, dozens of applications, and hundreds of filetype drivers - all in a single build process. Each driver has its own quirks and the abstraction leaks like a sieve. In retrospect, I think the spatial logic, the drivers, and the apps should have been broken up into loosely-coupled components. But the convenience of an all-in-one megalith was hard to beat.
- colkassad 1y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the link.