Ship ecw reader with vcpkg

[m-kuhn]

Feature description

Vcpkg based builds currently only ship open drivers.
Ecw is proprietary.

Additional context

No response

[m-kuhn]

I'm not sure the sdk is meant to be uploaded to a public place, but we'll need it in CI/github runner (or provision own instances for building).
I'm considering to upload it to a private repo

[rouault]

I'm not sure the sdk is meant to be uploaded to a public place

my guess would be probably not, but haven't read the license ;-)

A package based on that driver would probably need to ship the license/EULA file as well

[rouault]

Let me ping @psharma-gdal who is contributing support for future ECW SDK 6.0 (OSGeo/gdal#11593). @psharma-gdal : continuous integration testing of the ECW SDK is very impractical currently, both for GDAL and QGIS, and maybe not even allowed. Is there a way of improving this from Hexagon side ? Of course open source licensing of the SDK would be a stretch goal and would make things much easier. We might settle with a slightly more flexible licensing that allows the SDK from being downloadable from a public URL for testing purposes and ideally be able to create redistribuable packages (subject to the license of the SDK) from it. Woud that be possible?

[psharma-gdal]

Let me ping @psharma-gdal who is contributing support for future ECW SDK 6.0 (OSGeo/gdal#11593). @psharma-gdal : continuous integration testing of the ECW SDK is very impractical currently, both for GDAL and QGIS, and maybe not even allowed. Is there a way of improving this from Hexagon side ? Of course open source licensing of the SDK would be a stretch goal and would make things much easier. We might settle with a slightly more flexible licensing that allows the SDK from being downloadable from a public URL for testing purposes and ideally be able to create redistribuable packages (subject to the license of the SDK) from it. Woud that be possible?

I am presently attempting to run the python autotests against the ecw sdk version 6 locally. I will get back to you after I have some success regarding the same.
Also v6 SDK isn't publicly available yet and we can discuss later after its released.