What is the bug?

An empty geometry has a Distance to another geometry of 0; it would be better to raise an error, as this calculation is essentially undefined. For example, Python would would raise a TypeError if a user entered something like 1 > None .

Steps to reproduce the issue

Using the Python bindings:

line1=ogr.CreateGeometryFromWkt("LINESTRING EMPTY")
line2=ogr.CreateGeometryFromWkt("LINESTRING (0 0,5 5)")
line1.Distance(line2)

>>> 0.0

Versions and provenance

Reproduced on Windows 11, GDAL 3.9.0 (OSGeo4W) and Ubuntu 22.04, GDAL 3.8.5 (built from source).

Additional context

No response