[Slackbuilds-users] Feedback on upgrading GDAL/geos/proj

[Benjamin Trigona-Harany]

In 2018, the main opensource geospatial libraries - GDAL, proj, libgeotiff, 
libspatialite - started an effort to make core changes that could only be done 
simultaneously (https://gdalbarn.com/). Slowly the software that uses these 
libraries has been adopting that new tool chain. Slackware, however, is 
currently still on the old set of libraries, but I've finally sat down and 
worked through what will happen if SlackBuilds goes through the migration and 
I'd like to get feedback from maintainers and users on whether we should.

Here are the core upgrades for 14.2 that need to be coordinated:
gis/gdal 3.0.2
gis/proj 6.2.1
gis/geos 3.8.0
gis/libgeotiff 1.5.1
gis/libspatialite 4.3.0

Here are applications or other scripts that we get to upgrade. With a few 
exceptions we are no longer able to upgrade applications in this list without 
doing the above core library upgrades first:
gis/qgis 3.10.0
gis/postgis 3.0.0
gis/Fiona 1.8.9
gis/rasterio 1.1.0
gis/grass 7.8.0
gis/ossim 2.10.0
gis/OTB 7.0.0
gis/pdal 2.0.1
gis/pyproj 2.4.1
academic/Shark 4.0.0

There are a few regressions or scripts which will need to be removed (or 
possibly patched from dev branches):
gis/OTB will lose Python support
gis/qlandkartegt no longer builds (but it's deprecated in favour of qmapshack 
anyhow)
gis/osgEarth no longer builds but upcoming version 3.0 will work from what I 
can tell
gis/libLAS no longer builds but isn't required by any projects and looks to be 
deprecated in favour of PDAL
gis/merkaartor no longer builds but I think there might be commits in master 
that should make it work
gis/pyspatialite no longer works but it is not needed by newer versions of 
QGIS anymore
misc/zyGrib not building because of new proj

I've also tested the other scripts that depend directly on the core library 
upgrades, all of which are working.

Are the regressions that I have noted enough to hold back on going ahead with 
the upgrades? What about any indirect or optional dependencies?

Feel free to use this branch if you want to do any testing: https://
git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/log/?h=user/bosth/gdalbarn.

Ben