Discussion of Methods and API for Splitting an Oversize Polygon

• GEOS performs poorly as a POLYGON increases in number of vertices, even in the simple cases.

• It is often desirable to "split" a POLYGON with a high number of vertices into some number of smaller POLYGONs.

• From a user's perspective, some GIS processes result in very large POLYGON, for example 10,000 or 100,000 or more, vertices. There is a case to be made that PostGIS users would benefit from standard calls to take a single POLYGON as an input, and output some GEOMETRYCOLLECTION of POLYGON that are "equivalent", disregarding the problems inherent with the numeric precision model used.

• For the sake of discussion. let us assume we are operating on a POLYGON with a single outer ring, that is formally valid.

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Rough transcript of IRC on 07Mar13: