> On Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 10:09:31AM +0200, Davide Cesari wrote: >> [...]Hello to everybody, >> please note that shapelib is part of the OSGEO4W installation, >> >> https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/ >> >> which is currently the official and supported way to install shapelib >> (and to build it) on Windows; OSGEO4W comes with an interactive >> installer which allows you to choose the desired packages, from lower >> level libraries to full GIS applications, and the necessary dependencies >> are automatically installed. And of course it includes also Gdal/Ogr, as >> a more general approach to GIS formats. >> FYI. another useful site with high resolution, free (with limitations) >> country boundaries data in shapefile format is this one: >> http://www.gadm.org/ >> >> Best regards, Davide
@ Davide: That combination of shapelib and GDAL/OGR of the OSGEO4W installation might indeed be potentially useful to our Windows users. However, I am a bit concerned about flexibility. For example, if PLplot Windows users build PLplot with either MinGW or the proprietary Microsoft compilers can they always link to the OSGEO4W versions of shapelib and GDAL/OGR? Or are they forced to use just one type of Windows compiler? As I posted to this list previously shapelib is an extremely simple build. So for that I would advocate using a CMake-based build system to give maximum flexibility in compiler choices. The builds for GDAL/OGR can be complex (see remarks at http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/BuildHints and links from that page). However, I imagine those build requirements are substantially simplified for our needs where we just want to read from (but not write to) a lot of differently formatted map files and translate those to some uniform internal format that PLplot can use to decorate the map and possibly transform its coordinates before outputting the combined result in the normal way with our bit-mapped (for the GDAL case) or vector (for the shapelib or OGR cases) devices. So it is possible CMake might be the best choice for our needs in the GDAL/OGR case as well. But we only should be concerned about that question much further down the road after the shapelib effort is completed since that project will give us all some much-needed experience with modernizing PLplot's interactions with maps. On 2012-10-01 09:41+0100 Andrew Ross wrote: > [...]On Linux both shapelib and gdal/ogr are > commonly packaged by the distributions. > [...]Does anyone know > about Mac OSX? @ Andrew: macports (see http://www.macports.org/ports.php) has packages for both shapelib and gdal. I assume the latter contains ogr just like it does on Linux. There is also a pointer to privately maintained gdal Mac OS X binaries at http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/DownloadingGdalBinaries. @ everyone here: In sum it appears to me that shapelib and GDAL/OGR binary libraries are available for all platforms. For the Windows case there may be "dependency hell" issues for those binary libraries that could be solved by the CMake approach. That should be a trivial effort for shapelib so I think that is worth doing. I probably will do that myself if Phil doesn't want to do that himself just for the CMake experience. On the other hand, more effort would be required in the GDAL/OGR case to implement a CMake-based build system so when that time comes (_after_ the shapelib effort is completed), we will have to weigh the advantages of the CMake approach (fewer "dependency hell" issues) compared to the effort required to implement a CMake-based build system for GDAL/OGR. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Got visibility? Most devs has no idea what their production app looks like. Find out how fast your code is with AppDynamics Lite. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;262219671;13503038;y? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
