LiDAR import grayed out in grass7 port

[ATL-Flaneur (Andreas Yankopolus)]

The grass7 ports lists liblas as a dependency, but the resulting application has "LAS LiDAR points import [r.in.lidar]" grayed out. The GRASS wiki on ​LiDAR support talks about needing to add "--with-liblas" to the compile flags. Normally these flags are manipulated through MacPorts build options. However, the variants returned by "port info grass7" do not include a liblas options.

[ATL-Flaneur (Andreas Yankopolus)]

Grayed out LiDAR option.

[nilason (Nicklas Larsson)]

You can use v.in.pdal, which is installed by default, or r.in.pdal available as addon/extension. Both are based on ​PDAL and are newer modules dealing with lidar data. They need to be started from the console/terminal as there is no GUI menu for them.

[ATL-Flaneur (Andreas Yankopolus)]

I did some experimentation with this, building my own Linux binary. GRASS seems in an awkward spot at present with LPC data, as liblas has been deprecated in favor of pdal, but integration with pdal seems at an early phase. In particular, I couldn’t find a tutorial that matched present implementation of LPC handling. Wading into GRASS is not for the faint of heart.

[nilason (Nicklas Larsson)]

To the original question regarding liblas: it is actually a dependency to grass7 so no need for a variant, it is included by default. The problem as far as I understand, is that GRASS during configuration is looking for a liblas-config binary which is not installed with macports. I remember I did a half-hearted attempt to look into this last year: with no success.

[nilason (Nicklas Larsson)]

​PR 10418 addresses this issue.

[nilason (Nicklas Larsson)]

@ATL-Flaneur My fix with above-mentioned PR, which makes liblas work fine for GRASS, was received with a rather uninterested response. As I have no intention to address this in any other way (certainly not upstreams) nor having any patience or interest in arguing on a fix for a soon-to-be-obsolete port (which doesn’t work at all where it should) I throw in the towel. I’m sorry for the inconvenience for you and us other macports users, but I’m hopeful liblas support will be included with official GRASS distribution for Mac soon.

[ATL-Flaneur (Andreas Yankopolus)]

@nilason We're in an awkward phase where libLAS is being deprecated in favor of PDAL, but PDAL is far from fully integrated in release builds.

[nila <n_larsson@…>]

In 8cabf2349aee26d48ce98c6940e35b44de216f12/macports-ports (master):

grass7: fix liblas configuration

Closes: #62489