[ gpsdrive ] External program interfacing with gpsdrive

[stan]

> another option is the stand-alone DGlib C library which GRASS GIS uses
> for its network routing modules.
>   http://grass.osgeo.org/dglib/
>   http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Vector_network_analysis
>   http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/v.net.path.html

Will have a look through, thanks.
Played around with pgrouting yesterday, while it does the job and does it well 
there seems to be a serious amount of work needed configuring the database. I 
could be wrong here so please don't discredit pgrouting on my couple of hours 
of experience but it looks like a new set of tables needs to be built for 
every area of the map ie. a set of tables giving the relation of every town to 
every other town, and then another set of tables giving the relation of every 
street within a town to every other street in that town....for every town.
If anyone can call bull**** on this, please do, I hope I'm missing something 
as pgrouting would be great if it wasn't for this.

> whenever possible we should aim to "subcontract"/"delegate" work to
> externally developed support libraries. Our limited manpower means we
> can't spend too much effort reinventing wheels.

...one of the most significant aspects of open source IMHO :) A lib using 
libgda to suck in the data and spit out a path would be useful to a lot of 
other projects, if the calculation work is in any of the projects linked then 
that should be most of the hard work done.

> I don't know about how GDAL is used for DB access, but IMO it is the
> powerhouse which should be used for reading geospatial maps. It, along
> with PROJ.4, is really /the/ keystone open source GIS library and
> support software.

My bad, I had been looking at the gnome database info and got mixed up, should 
have been libgda. As to my thoughts on access via mapnik, it never ceases to 
amaze me the crap I come out with sometimes :)

> enter zero-config SQLite, but try not to import an industrial strength
> worldwide PostGIS database into it!

lol. The maps packages (deb's) in the files section are a good idea and will be 
great once things settle down a bit. 
Its a shame there is no mainstream way of using posgresql databases on linux, 
the there are a lot of projects that would be made simpler if they could rely 
on a default database config and location. I'm thinking of the CPU and HD 
hogging desktop search apps but there are plenty more.
Anyway, rambling again. Thanks for the info.
cheers