This is rather a long question but...
Today I ran into an issue with ArcSDE which luckily for me the latest MS4W resolved (thanks to everyone's efforts in keeping things current) which leads me onto a question.
Our solution also uses the OGR tools and specifically ogrinfo to find out field names from ESRI shape files or MapInfo Tab files. We have been quite fortunate in that we have been able to use the compiled binaries from FWTools (and another thanks to Frank for these!). Unfortunately this method won't work for ArcSDE as FWTools doesn't support ArcSDE. It got me thinking to how MapServer now works with the libmap.dll's for different input formats.
As I don't have client libraries for ArcSDE (but our clients
do on their networks) it may prove difficult to rebuild ogrinfo or even
MapServer if say I wanted to have a higher MAX_SYMBOLS than the default with
SDE support.
My question is this: when compiling with ArcSDE support there is a need for the c header files or similar from ArcSDE. Is there a need for the actual DLL's? If there is couldn't an open source dummy set of DLL's with all the external c functions setup be built? This could potentially allow for people to have their custom compiles work and also have a custom version that has been compiled for ArcSDE. Obviously if anyone wanted to query ArcSDE in their development environment they would need real DLL's.
Basically it would be great if one could do things how the
MS4W works at present. I think it is
great that you can pop a different libmap.dll (and other supporting dll's) into
the cgi directory and hey presto you have extra data format support.
I guess there could be potential copyright issues in doing this but it was just a thought...
Cheers
Mike
