PDAL is a BSD licensed library for translating and manipulating
point cloud data of various formats. It is a library that is
analogous to the GDAL raster library. PDAL is focussed on reading,
writing, and translating point cloud data from the ever-growing
constellation of data formats that are being developed for working
with multi-dimensional emitted-pulse scanning systems. While PDAL is
not explicitly limited to working with LiDAR data formats, its initial
rollout is focused in that area.

PDAL includes several plugins needed for some extended features or to
write/read data in specific formats. The build of these plugins
requires optional dependencies included in Slackware 15.0 or available
as packages from Slackbuilds.org. Other plugins need third parts
dependencies that are not available here.

If their dependencies (autodetected) are installed, the script enables
by default the build of the supported plugins. You can disable each of
them by passing to the slackwbuild its environment variable set as
"no" (for example E57=no ./pdal.SlackBuild).

Plugins enabled by default if their dependencies are installed (see
README.SBo to know what feature they extend):

- E57: requires xerces-c
- OSG: requires OpenSceneGraph
- DRACO: requires libdraco

HDF, ICEBRIDGE do not require optional deps

Other optional dependencies (autodetected) that improve the
functionality of PDAL are jsoncpp and laszip. The installation of
laszip is strongly recommended.
Zstandard (zstd) is another optional dependency but in Slackware 15.0
stable it is autodetected if the package zstd-cmake is installed
(nothing to do in Slackware current).

PDAL can include also the Matlab plugin, that allows to write data to
a .mat file. Since the standard MATLAB is a proprietary software, the
build of this plugin is disabled by default. If you need this plugin
launch the script with MATLAB=yes ./pdal.SlackBuild

Warnings: 

1. The build of these plugin does not support free platforms
compatible or alternative to MATLAB, like Octave or Scilab.

2. Although tests are disabled in this slackbuild, cmake looks for
an installation of googletest (gtest) and if not found it tries to 
fetch a bundle googletest from github. So, gtest is required even not
used in the build.
