odin_gdal

GDAL is the prevalent native (odin-rs-external) library to read, translate and modify geospatial data sets, supporting a wide range of formats (NetCDF, hdf5, tiff, png, jpeg, webp and many more). It is one of the key dependencies of odin-rs.

The role of odin_gdal is to simplify import and use of this complex library by means of adding utility functions and tools on top of the underlying gdal crate that does the linking to the native gdal libraries.

Building GDAL from Source

Although it is recommended to install GDAL through native platform package managers it is possible to build from source, which is available on https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal.git an documented here.

You can either build a shared or a static gdal library, but keep in mind that a static build requires to add - depending on build configuration - all referenced sub-dependencies (tiff, netcdf, hdf5, jpeg etc.). This can be a daunting task.

The procedure to do a shared library build follows this scheme:

mkdir ~/opt
cd ~/opt
git clone https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal.git
...
cd gdal
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_PYTHON_BINDINGS=OFF -DBUILD_JAVA_BINDINGS=OFF -DBUILD_APPS=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=install ..
...
cmake --build .
...
cmake --build . --target install
...

Depending on the native package management that was used for installing GDAL dependencies you might have to add cmake build opts such as -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/include.

To use the library in your odin-rs builds you need to set respective environment variables:

export GDAL_VERSION=...
export GDAL_HOME=$HOME/opt/gdal/build/install # based on example above - adapt to your install location
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GDAL_HOME/lib

Since we change an external library it is recommended to run cargo clean before any subsequent cargo build or cargo run.