SRS barn raising: 5th report

This is the fifth progress report of the GDAL SRS barn effort. A lot of activity in PROJ developments has been done this month again.

New conversion and transformation methods referenced in the EPSG database have been integrated:

• Projection methods: Lambert Conic Conformal (2SP Michigan) and Laborde Oblique Mercator
• "Change of Vertical Unit", "Vertical offset" and other fixes relative to vertical component handling
• "Axis order reversal"
• "Affine parametric transformation", and its implementation in PROJ computation core
• "Molodensky-Badekas" transformation, and its implementation in PROJ computation core

Regarding database-related activities:

• Make concatenate operation building from proj.db robust to inverse sub-operations (the EPSG database lists chained operations, but does not indicate if the forward or reverse path must be taken)
• Reference transformation grids available in the proj-datumgrid-* packages, such as NAD83 -> NAD83(HPGN) grids, OSTN15_NTv2_OSGBtoETRS.gsb
• Add a celestial_body table and celestial_body property to ellipsoid, as a provision to handle non-Earth bodies
• Add a text_definition column to geodetic_crs and projected_crs to allow definition by PROJ string (or WKT)
• Add  the possibility of defining in 'other_transformation' a transformation defined by a PROJ pipeline
• The createOperations() method that returns transformations between two CRS is now able to find pivot CRS when no direct transformation path exists. One notable fact to underline is that the pivot is not necessarily WGS84, and several candidate pivots are explored. When transforming from CRS A to CRS B, the database will be searched for all CRS C for which there is a referenced transformation from/to both CRS A and CRS B (advanced users may also be able to restrict the candidate(s) pivot to use)
• Import PROJ.4 definitions contained currently data/IGNF into the database in a relational form. A script to directly use the official registry as the source, instead of the PROJ.4 strings that derive from it, has also been developed but is not used yet.
• Import of the CRS definitions and transformations between horizontal CRS from the CSV files of the published Esri Projection Engine Database Documentation. The projected CRS are imported with their ESRI WKT definition directly put in the database, so ongoing work is in progress to be able to ingest this WKT1 variant in the WKT2-based form used internally by PROJ.
• Update the CRS and transformations to EPSG dataset v9.5.4

The addition of the DerivedEngineeringCRS, DerivedParametricCRS and DerivedTemporalCRS classes mark the completion of the implementation of the full ISO-19111:2018 CRS modelling

A rather tedious task has consisted in optimizing the code (mostly by avoiding a lot of unnecessary instanciation of temporary C++ objects, involving looking frequently at disassembled output to locate them) to make the generated binary lighter. This has enabled an optimized build to go down from 3.1 to 2.6 MB

The Doxygen-generated documentation of the C++ API has been integrated with the general PROJ documentation in ReST format, with the Breathe module.

An initial C API that makes part of the C++ functionality available to C users has also been added.

Finally, a RFC has been written to officially submit this work for PROJ PSC approval (doubling the size of a code base and changing its language requirements is not a mundane detail). This RFC has now been officially adopted, and will make it possible to ultimately merge this work into PROJ master. You may skim through it to look at a few examples of the use of the projinfo utility that demonstrates part of the new capabilities developed.