Expose GDAL driver metadata

[jorisvandenbossche]

Would we want something like this in fiona: Toblerity/Fiona#950 ?

It would allow to check the extension of a driver (and making the driver inference from the extension for writing more robust, cfr Toblerity/Fiona#948), the open options, whether the driver supports certain data types, etc (but it would probably be mostly copy/paste from fiona ..)

[theroggy]

Sounds like it is at least somewhat linked to #81 and #71

[jorisvandenbossche]

linked to #81

Yes, if we have this, it could indeed be used for #81. But I think it's also certainly fine to already do something about #81 without this feature (this issue is also meant for user facing API, while for the tests we can hard-code a bunch of things on the short term)

[theroggy]

I wonder if it would be possible to get more driver metadata into gdal... as this metadata isn't python-specific, it would be way more elegant to have it there I think.

[jorisvandenbossche]

Which additional information are you thinking about? (the current GDAL metadata already exposes quite a lot: extensions, which data types are supported, whether nulls are supported, ..)

[theroggy]

Which additional information are you thinking about? (the current GDAL metadata already exposes quite a lot: extensions, which data types are supported, whether nulls are supported, ..)

Ah, OK, then I misinterpreted what was in fiona. In that case, ignore my remark :-).

[jorisvandenbossche]

I started using the GDAL driver metadata internally in #189, but without publicly exposing it for now.