The upcoming (not immediate) release of GRASS 8.5 may be an opportunity to bump the required minimum version of GDAL to 3.x and PROJ 8+, in order to simplify existing code and future maintenance.
I filed issues for each library:
GDAL:
https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/issues/6629
PROJ:
https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/issues/6628
If you have an opinion on either, please post it there.
Best regards,
Nicklas
A PR:
is submitted to set GDAL min. requirement to version 3.7. If you think this is too high set, please tell.
GDAL 3.7 or newer is new required on main (and on future 8.5 release) after commit:
Update of PROJ requirement is proposed with PR:
The question is, wouldnāt it be better to bump requirement to version 9, and possibly to a point release up till 9.2ā9.4? The version 8 was very much a spring board to the new APIāit was quickly replaced with 9āand is not the default version on any of the (important) platforms. Such a bump would not currently make any difference in GRASS code, but may in the futureā¦ Thoughts anyone?
Thank you for the detailed explanation!
Iām still new to GRASS development, so Iām following these discussions to better understand how core dependencies like GDAL and PROJ affect the build and future development.
From a newcomerās perspective, raising the minimum required versions seems reasonable if it simplifies maintenance and avoids legacy API issues, especially since the newer versions are widely available on most platforms.
I donāt have enough experience yet to comment deeply, but I appreciate the context and the reasoning behind these version bumps. Itās very helpful for understanding the overall development direction.
Thanks again for sharing this!
On Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 8:53 PM Nicklas Larsson via OSGeo Discourse <noreply@discourse.osgeo.org> wrote:
nila
December 4Update of PROJ requirement is proposed with PR:
configure: drop support for PROJās old
proj_api.hAPImainānilason:fix_proj_versionopened 09:22AM - 04 Dec 25 UTC
nilason
+127 -1285This tentatively make the version 9.0 the minimal requirement of PROJ support. (ā¦
The question is, wouldnāt it be better to bump requirement to version 9, and possibly to a point release up till 9.2ā9.4? The version 8 was very much a spring board to the new APIāit was quickly replaced with 9āand is not the default version on any of the (important) platforms. Such a bump would not currently make any difference in GRASS code, but may in the futureā¦ Thoughts anyone?
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With commit
the required minimal version of PROJ is 9.0 for GRASS 8.5.0dev (main) and future 8.5 release.
The updates of GDAL and PROJ requirements and accompanying cleaning up of code, resulted in a net removal of some 1700 lines of code and tremendous simplification of future improvements.
Cheers,
Nicklas
