GDAL/OGR Annual Report 2007

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
• Contact name: Frank Warmerdam

Key Accomplishments

• GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 Release
  • Over 20 new file format drivers added.
  • Five new feature RFCs implemented
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.0 Release
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3, and 1.4.4 stable branch releases
  • The 1.4.x series represents the first time the project maintained a stable branch from which bug fix releases could be issued.
  • The 1.4.x series included nearly 200 bug fixes
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.0 Release
  • Six new drivers
  • Many bug fixes and new features
• $32500 USD in funds collected from nine sponsors - thanks to Analytical Graphics/AGI (Gold), i-cubed, Cadcorp, Safe Software, SRC, ACT, Waypoint and INGRES.
• Mateusz Loskot was contracted using project sponsorship funds
• Added Tamas Szekeres and Even Rouault to the project steering committee
• Added 12 new Commiters
• Migrated the mailing lists, web site and bug tracking to OSGeo
• A one day sprint/hack-a-thon at FOSS4G, including distribution of "Team GDAL" t-shirts.
• Three Google Summer of Code student projects.

Areas for Improvement

• The 1.4.3 release included ABI (application binary interface) breakage and had to be retracted. Better review and testing mechanisms are needed to avoid breaking our ABI stability guarantees.
• While substantial progress was made over the year, the project still struggles with many old bug reports that have not been addressed.
• Additional outreach to projects and products using GDAL is required to ensure their needs are being met.
• Improve our provision of "standard binaries" for at least Win32, Linux and MacOS X. The OSGeo4W effort may be helpful in this regard for Win32.
• Broaden the coverage of the test suite (more formats, more special cases)

Opportunities to Help

• Contribute to documentation - especially FAQ, special build notes, language specific examples and suggestions and general how-to topics - add these in the Trac wiki!
• Seek additional sponsorships, to provide more stable maintainer funding.
• Testing and quality bug reports are always valuable.

Outlook for 2008

The growth of the base of project developers is very encouraging, and will hopefully continue. The coming year is an opportunity to continue to professionalize and community-ize project maintenance reducing the reliance on any one contributor. I also see this as a year when we need to work to make the projects technical strengths accessible to more projects through continued improvements to language bindings and documentation, and to more end users via easy to use standard binaries (eg. OSGeo4W).

I also look forward to more funded maintainer hours available to deal with our bug report backlog, and to ensure timely response to new bug reports. This will hopefully provide a payback to sponsors, and ensure a continued positive technical reputation for the project.