On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Mathieu Basille
<basille@ase-research.org> wrote:
Dear Jürgen,
Thank you for your answer.
I started by installing GDAL 1.8 from experimental, but now I'm a little bit
confused about GDAL. What exactly is the difference between 'gdal-bin' and
'libgdal1-1.X.0' (where X can be 6, 7, or 8)?
I noticed I could install all three versions of libgdal1 together, without
any dependency trouble, but I have to choose the version of gdal-bin. Am I
right to think that only the latter (gdal-bin) defines the version of GDAL
used by the system? In other words, the programs shipped with gdal-bin uses
the libgdal1 corresponding to the gdal-bin version and do not care about
other versions.
Or did I miss something? The package 'qgis' depends on libgdal1-1.7.0 but
does not care about gdal-bin, which means that I can have QGIS installed
with gdal-bin version 1.8 (from experimental), but QGIS not using gdal
1.8...
Someone else could probably explain this better, but I'll give it a shot.
GDAL is a library which other programs can leverage, this is the
libgdal* packages. If you have multiple libgdal packages installed
they won't interfere and applications are usually set to use a certain
version of the library.
But GDAL also ships with some command line utilities like gdalwarp,
gdalinfo, etc. which are in the gdal-bin package. The version of
gdal-bin controls which version of these utilities are installed (and
which gdal library version the utilities use)