GDAL wrapper [WAS: how to put in octave forge?]

[Philip Nienhuis]

Hi

shashank khare wrote:
> thanks for the input.
>
> I will keep it in github till documentation is in good shape. Its my
> first contribution towards open source and I am still learning (Octave,
> Doxygen, build management, unit tests, licensing, IDEs etc). I guess I
> will be able to find out developer(s) who can maintain it in long term.
> I am calling it octave-gdal project since primarily its a wrapper on
> gdal. Will not develop wrapper on proj4 as it is already developed. As
> far as compatibility with matlab I can take it up but little later.
> Right now my goal is to help people read and write raster GIS data using
> Octave.

I've tried reading raster stuff with your gdalread function and it seems 
to work well and fast with some tiff files I downloaded (i.e., 5x5 m DEM 
data from the Netherlands).
Some remarks though:

- gdalread returns output arg "map" as a 1x1 cell array (containing a 
1x1 struct). Please let it return a struct right away.

- There's no information at all about the second (required) argument 
"type". Can you provide info on what is does? I couldn't discern any 
differences between specifying 0 or 1.


I'd advise to just fix those 2 gdalread issues and then leave it alone; 
.m file wrappers can be used around it for the rest (error handling, 
Matlab compatibility, other options, etc).  m-files are much easier to 
maintain.
I already have a simple wrapper for gdalread and I can absorb your stuff 
+ that wrapper .m-file in the mapping package.

BTW "Raw" raster data can also be read using imread followed by properly 
georeferencing the result.

As to shaperead.cc: that doesn't compile with octave-4.1.0+ (development 
version) for 64-bit windows on my Win7 box.
The mapping package already contains a shaperead function. Later on we 
can see which one is to be preferred in the long run.

>
> In the meantime will put nice README and tests so that people start
> using it. I see licensing as a restriction on freedom of
> expression. Therefore I went to MIT style licensing which is liberal
> and therefore fit in with more restrictive licensing.

There exist several MIT licenses some of which do not look GPL-compatible.
According to Carnë the version you use seems to be OK.

Philip