MrSID as an external plugin

[aboudreault]

The included patch (largerly inspired by ECW external plugin made by frankie) does allow building a gdal_MrSID.so plugins with an external compilation unit.

The idea is allowing users to add easily MrSID support to a binary distribution of GDAL, such as the Debian one. One needs only to build and install the MrSID lib and use a tiny suitable package to build the GDAL MrSID plugin. The patch is taken against 1.5.3 but it should be easy adding to trunk or other branches. It would be nice if it could be added to mainstream GDAL of course

Related bug: #2385 (ECW plugin)

[aboudreault]

Note that you'll need to apply the patch from the gdal-1.5.3/frmts/mrsid directory... i made the patch from this directory instead of the main gdal directory by mistake.

[warmerdam]

Alan,

I hate to say it, but I'm not too fond of treating these plugins as distinct source packages. Amoung other things it substantially complicates release production. It also results in a proliferation of extra stuff in every directory to be handled as a plugin.

So I'd prefer not to go further with this approach - at least without further discussion in the community.

[aboudreault]

Ok, I see. I thought that you approved the solution sent by frankie because there is not comment to think otherwise in the ticket #2385 . In fact, it's not very a problem anyway... this patch is mainly for us and will simply be added in the Debian-GIS repository and applied to gdal when needed.

Thanks.

[warmerdam]

Closing as wontfix in the hope of avoiding more confusion.