GDAL 2.1

Finally starting to catch up. First up is a big GDAL 2.1 update (I skipped 2.0). Note that for end-users this will not be automatically used by other software like QGIS and GRASS. Next will be updating QGIS (new versions & to use GDAL 2.1).

GEOS 3.5 & PROJ Update & PostGIS 2.2

GEOS Framework updated to 3.5. Needed for PostGIS 2.2. PROJ Framework updated to fix linking problem with tools.

This is also the beginning of a system minimum update. GEOS and PostGIS now have a minimum system of Mt Lion (10.8), though Mt Lion appears to be now dead from the absence of a recent security update. I need to support Mt Lion for a short time at least, but I recommend at least Mavericks and in the near future I might shift the minimum to Mavericks.

New QGIS Packaging

I’ve made the installation of QGIS simpler, by including the GDAL and Matplotlib packages. For now this only applies to the long term support release (2.8), and I’ll probably only update the download when QGIS is updated, so the separate frameworks may be newer than what is packaged with QGIS. If I try to update the whole thing every time one part changes, it’ll just get messy. I also added a note to the first readme about installing multiple versions of QGIS, basically don’t.

Postgres + Yosemite Upgrade

One thing I found right away is the Yosemite upgrade killed my installed Postgres. I think Apple’s upgrade process did a search for certain postgres folders (for temporary files, no data files are deleted) and deleted them, probably assuming they were for their Postgres and that they would be reconstructed later in the upgrade process. I added some repair instructions on my Postgres page.

End of the Cats? (Mt Lion EOL?)

Well, I was forced to upgrade to Yosemite this week. I held out on Mt Lion as long as I could. Even shortly before the release of El Capitan there were signs of the impending demise of Mt Lion at work: certificate problems on some sites, installing Mt Lion from scratch (couldn’t) to try to fix a slow Mac, one critical package we use “deprecated” Mt Lion support in their current version.

I suspect Apple will stop providing security updates for Mt Lion, we’ll see in their next update. I haven’t decided yet if I will support Mt Lion if Apple does not continue security updates, it’s a nice solid system but the certificate issue makes it impractical for general use.

I was going to start looking at GDAL 2.0 this weekend, but I need to check that my development environment is working properly first. Shouldn’t be too hard.