Bug#947960: gdal: Doesn't build on ports without java

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 1/2/20 9:07 PM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Sebastiaan Couwenberg, le jeu. 02 janv. 2020 20:51:43 +0100, a ecrit:
>> Is there a particular reason you want to build gdal on hppa, hurd &
>> kfreebsd? Is it blocking any important packages?
> 
> It is directly blocking various packages (see attached list), and from
> there, by dependency, 81 packages in total on hurd-i386.

Most of those packages are maintained by the GIS team as well, and
unlikely to have actual users on those archs.

opencv is known to have made gdal more popular, once it added gdal to
its dependencies the number of users grew significantly. opencv is not
on your list however.

openscenegraph is another slightly more general purpose package, but
like gdal none of its rdeps are very important.

>> I can't imagine actual users of gdal on those archs, but it may be a
>> lack of imagination on my part.
> 
> direct users, possibly not indeed, but indirectly you quickly get
> packages which can be obstacle to other things, e.g. a positioning
> package that would happen to be used by widgets of desktop environments.

Ubuntu has gdal in universe which seems to confirm that is not in the
dependency chain of DEs.

If gnome-maps ever starts supporting local data that may make gdal
significantly more important for desktop environments, but for now it's
mostly a viewer with no GIS dependencies. The same goes for marble in
the KDE ecosystem.

So I don't think you have to worry about not having gdal on these
architectures just yet.

We had a similar situation with proj and its libproj-java package, the
Java build dependencies prevented hurd & kfreebsd from building the
package. With proj being a core library in the geospatial field it
blocked most other GIS packages on those archs. Still not a big loss due
to the lack of actual users. The Java bindings were dropped when they
also broke on release architectures. The same will happen with the Java
bindings in gdal when they break on release architectures.

If a stronger case for gdal on hppa, hurd & kfreebsd can be made, I'll
consider dropping the Java bindings for the sake of ports as well.

Kind Regards,

Bas

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