Which external drivers to support

[evetion]

We build GDAL (https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil/tree/master/G/GDAL) only with the most basic drivers/support for now. This includes:

• GEOS
• curl (Compile with libcurl support GDALBuilder#2)
• sqlite3 (Compile with sqlite driver GDALBuilder#5)
• PROJ 6

Which drivers should we also include? See the raster and vector format lists on the GDAL website.

• JP2OpenJPEG (jp2 driver missing? #64)
• libwebp
• libzstd (as a compression option for selected drivers)
• libexpat (enables many XML-based formats)
• libpq (PostgreSQL / PostGIS) [GDAL] add PostgreSQL support JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil#5703

Note that it is not the goal to provide everyone with a GDAL build with all drivers. Many drivers see only little use and would increase both the build size and complexity of maintaining the build too much. Therefore it would be good to try to find a rather minimal build that includes enough drivers for most use cases.

If you do need an esoteric format that will not be included in the default build, this does not mean you cannot use this wrapper. If you provide your own build, you can simply point to that instead, see #64 (comment).

[visr]

This is also a nice reference for what could consitute a good set of drivers to include: https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/tree/master/docker

We should probably aim to cover ultrasmall first, then small.

[evetion]

UltraSmall

Raster drivers: VRT, GTiff, HFA, PNG, JPEG, MEM, JP2OpenJPEG, WEB, GPKG
Vector drivers: Shapefile, MapInfo, VRT, Memory, GeoJSON, GPKG, SQLite
External libraries enabled: libsqlite3, libproj, libcurl, libjpeg, libpng, libwebp, libzstd

Small

Raster drivers: ultrasmall + built-in + SQLite-based ones + network-based ones
Vector drivers: ultrasmall + built-in + most XML-based ones + network-based ones + PostgreSQL
External libraries enabled: ultrasmall + libexpat, libpq, libssl

Normal

Raster drivers: small + netCDF, HDF5, BAG
Vector drivers: small + Spatialite, XLS
External libraries enabled: small + libgeos, libhdf5, libhdf5, libkea, libnetcdf, libfreexl, libspatialite, libxml2, libpoppler

[yeesian]

On the surface this issue looks complete based on #65 (comment). Are there remaining TODOs?

[visr]

I think the remaining TODO's is completing and tracking UltraSmall as listed above, a few are stil missing from that, I believe libpng, libwebp, libzstd.

And next would be finishing Small. Although we also have a few items from Normal, such as libgeos. Would be good to update the OP with checkboxes for this though. (edit: done)

[visr]

It would be nice to have support for GeoArrow and GeoParquet as well. This was brought up in #136 (comment). But it would first require switching the build to CMake, which is something we should do soon anyway, since for GDAL 3.6 it will be the only option. EDIT: done in JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil#5423

I saw conda-forge/gdal-feedstock#628 discussing about the possible advantages to build drivers that are large external dependencies as plugins. We might want to look into that as well for Arrow, Parquet and perhaps netCDF.