GDAL/OGR Annual Report 2016 and first half 2017

• Period covered by report: Jan-2016 Jun-2017

Key Accomplishments

• Two major milestones with the release of ​GDAL 2.1.0 in April 2016 and ​GDAL 2.2.0 in April 2017. Adding 12 new drivers and implementing 5 new RFCs for GDAL 2.1.0, and 7 new drivers and implementing 4 new RFCs for GDAL 2.2.0. Many other improvements in various areas.
• In addition to those feature versions, 9 maintenance releases ​1.11.4, ​2.0.2, ​1.11.5, ​2.0.3, ​2.1.1, ​2.1.2, ​2.1.3, ​2.1.4 and ​2.2.1 have been issued, fixing hundreds of defects.
• The Google Summer of Code 2016 edition was the opportunity for Avyav Kumar Singh to work on adding support for 3 new geometry types in the OGR data model (was merged in GDAL 2.2), and for Alexandr Borzykh to develop a free and open source driver to read Autocad DWG r2000 (merged in GDAL 2.2 too)
• One new committer in 2016: Lucian Plesea

Events

GDAL was presented at FOSS4G-Fr 2016, FOSS4G 2016 and FOSS4G-Europe 2017

Areas for Improvement

• Continue clearing the backlog of tickets

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!
• Testing and quality bug reports are always valuable.
• People are always welcome to help reviewing code contributions & volunteer to do releases (hint to developers with commit rights), answer user questions and take part to bugfixing.
• While new features can generally be funded, most of non-customer-specific day-to-day maintenance is not.

Outlook for end 2017-2018

• The GDAL 2.3.0 version currently in development should be released in theory accordingly to the usual yearly release cycle around April or May 2018.
• New maintenance GDAL 2.2.x releases foreseen in the meantime.
• Lots of security releated fixes due to the participation to the ​OSS-Fuzz initiative.