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Re:PostGIS 2.5.0 released by dagw on Monday September 24, 2018 @08:36AM (#18057140)
Everybody is hoping something other than shape files eventually takes off, as its's universally agreed to be a pretty terrible format. The problem is that the industry hasn't unified around a single format with GeoJSON, GeoPackage and to a lesser extend KML all trying to become the next shape file.

As it stands however, everybody and everything can read shape files and that cannot be said about any other format.

Re:PostGIS 2.5.0 released by cwmma on Monday September 24, 2018 @08:59AM (#18057274)
The real annoying thing is that one of the reasons shapefiles are so bad, and so hard to replace is they fill a bunch of niches in a half assed way and no sane replacement format is going to replace shapefile in all situations.

Need a standardized way to disseminate data that's super easy to ingest? GeoJSON and KML work great there, while GeoPackage is going to be not a great fit for things like APIs plus you can't do a streaming read.

Need a way to edit and work with data locally and maybe send stuff around your office? Geopackage is going to be a much better fit then GeoJSON or KML.

Re:PostGIS 2.5.0 released by dagw on Monday September 24, 2018 @09:10AM (#18057337)
Another 'hidden' feature of shape files that I've seen regularly abused (and abused myself more than once) is that they use the standard dBASE format to store their data. Meaning that all kinds of apps that know nothing about shape files (like Excel or Access) can be used to read and analyse the data stored within them.
Re:PostGIS 2.5.0 released by cwmma on Monday September 24, 2018 @09:23AM (#18057422)
also the encoding of the database is stored in a file that ends in `.cpg` which I'm pretty sure stands for code page.

Source: I wrote a shapefile parser and generator.