Bug#932464: GDAL link against CFITSIO

[Chiara Marmo]

Package: libgdal20
Severity: whishlist

Dear GDAL maintainers, libgdal20 is packaged in Debian 10 with the option '--with-cfitsio=no' due to some license issues in CFITSIO (see [1]).
I have worked to an extension of the FITS driver in GDAL (see [2]), funded by a European programme, aiming to improve interoperability between astronomical and remote sensing formats. We hoped to make FITS easily readable by Open GIS software using GDAL.

The license issue about CFITSIO has been solved in CFITSIO > 3.26 (see [3]): from the changes.txt

"
   - replaced all the source code in CFITSIO that was distributed under the
     GNU General Public License with freely available code.  In particular,
     the  gzip file compression and uncompression code was replaced by the
     zlib compression library.  Thus, beginning with this version 3.26 of CFITSIO,
     other software applications may freely use CFITSIO without necessarily
     incurring any GNU licensing requirement.  See the License.txt file for
     the CFITSIO licensing requirements.
"

CFITSIO authors cannot see any restriction to link against CFITSIO which is definitely a Public Domain released software.
If I understand correctly GNU/GPL files are still present in the source but not used (see [4]).

As Debian/Ubuntu distributions are very popular, having GDAL not linked against CFITSIO in them is a critical issue for interoperability.

I'm wondering if it could be possible to reconsider the packaging option of GDAL.

Thanks for your attention.
Regards,

Chiara
 

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/422537
[2] https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/1298
[3] https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/FTP/software/fitsio/c/docs/changes.txt
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-astro-team/cfitsio/blob/master/debian/copyright


-- 
Chiara Marmo
Ingénieur de Recherche GEOPS - Paris Sud-11
Bât 509
Tel: +33 (0)1 69 15 49 03