Re: [DebianGIS] grass from .deb, gdal from source?

[Hamish <hamish_b@yahoo.com>]

Tyler Smith wrote:
> I discovered (with help from the grass help list) a small
> bug in gdal, already reported and fixed in the latest gdal
> sources. Now I'm wondering how best to acquire the fixed
> version of gdal. Can I compile it from source and continue
> to use the version of Grass 6.4 provided as a Debian
> package, or will I have to purge all the Debian packages
> and build both Grass and gdal from source?

My solution to this is to get the latest GDAL sources and build
and run it locally without ever installing it. That way it is
non-invasive and I don't have to worry about breaking everything
that relies on GDAL. (which is a lot)

After building I run gdal_translate to make a GeoTiff, or ogr2ogr
to make a shapefile (or whatever), and then import the converted
version of the data using the system installed GDAL.


steps as follows:

cd 
mkdir -p dev/gdal/svn
cd dev/gdal/svn
svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/trunk/gdal trunk
./configure
make

# but don't install ...

then to run it:

# set up environment to temporarily use SVN gdal
export GDAL_DATA=$HOME/dev/gdal/svn/trunk/data
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/dev/gdal/svn/trunk/.libs
PATH=$HOME/dev/gdal/svn/trunk/apps:$PATH

now when you run gdal_translate or ogr2ogr from that terminal
you'll get the latest svn code version, not the system one.
when you close that terminal everything is back to normal.

it is not recommended to run GRASS etc. from within that
alternate-gdal terminal, as the programs will be built for the
earlier version and will quickly become confused and crash.



good luck,
Hamish


ps- in GRASS 5 is a module for importing USGS dems directly,
but this was abandoned for GRASS 6 as GDAL does it.