[Gpsbabel-code] interested in esri/shapefiles?

[Robert L. <rob...@us...>]

Some cat trolled me privately to look at adding support of esri
shapefiles.  I roamed around the net and found a library with a
compatible license, a reasonable API, and portability goals similar to
ours.  I sketched out a proof-of-concept that could pull waypoints out
of a dbf/shp pair of points.  But then he flatlined and quit answering
my messages.

As I roamed around the net to see what kind of data was actually
available in shapefiles, I either lacked the imagination to see how
it was useful to pass through GPSBabel or the googling skills to find
useful data.

I'd consider it adequate justification to finish it if I could find
major U.S. roads in this format just to hitch it to Ron's arc filter
since that seems to be the sort of stuff this format is used for a lot.

The code isn't huge (20K of x86 .text) and the backend goop in GPSBabel
is pretty mechanical impedance matching.  So it's not hard; I just can't
find a reason to care.  So I've had it in a corner as a curiosity.  Do
any of you know of any reason to finish this?

RJL