Any chance of using newer Lerc version?

[uilianries]

Greetings!

As OsGearth 3.8 is getting updated to be packaged in Conan, via PR conan-io/conan-center-index#29755, and just like vcpkg, Conan also manages dependencies, there is a question regarding the Lerc version consumed by OsGearth.

The current 3.8 third party folder points to use Lerc on commit 19542a00b9a8b5c1089f74239e5859e02e403212, which is 6 years old and does not follow newer changes from that project. Current latest Lerc version 4.1 and is only 2 months old: https://github.com/Esri/lerc/blob/HEAD/CHANGELOG.md

Currently, a few Linux distros like Arch and Fedora are pushing a patch to make it possible to consume Lerc 4.x when building and packaging OsGearth:

• https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/osgearth/blob/rawhide/f/osgearth_unbundle.patch
• https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/osgearth_unbundle.patch?h=osgearth

Similarly, we have the same idea in the current PR for Conan, but we first want to clarify if it will be possible to update Lerc for OsGearth, or if it is something really optional and could be disabled by default.

Regards!

[jasonbeverage]

We'd be fine with using LERC as an external dependency, we use it as a submodule at the moment just to simplify building. It is optional though and only required for the osgDB lerc plugin which isn't widely used. For 3.8 if you want to either build against the later LERC or just disable the lerc plugin altogether that would be fine. We will look at removing lerc as a submodule and building against a packaged version instead.

[uilianries]

@jasonbeverage Thank you for your answer!