QGIS hackfest 2011 (Zürich)
16.11.2011 19:18 · Notes · qgis, meetings
The 6th Quantum GIS developer meeting in Zurich (Switzerland) ended on Monday. Below are my impressions, supplemented with information from Tim’s blog.
This meeting was more “quiet” than the previous ones: the presentations were only held on the first day (but the picture and sound were very good), there were no announcements of the presentations on IRC, so it wasn’t always clear who was speaking and what the topic was.Some topics were discussed on IRC and the mailing lists, if you wanted to, you could contribute with your comments, suggestions or topics. Subjectively, there were not that many commits, partly due to the use of GIT, but still not that many changes compared to previous hackfests.
One of the main discussions was on issues related to topology support. This was facilitated by the presence of Sandro Santilli, one of the developers of GEOS and PostGIS. Topological editing has been discussed almost since the introduction of digitising support in QGIS. At the meeting, we discussed the possibility and prospects of creating a common mechanism for topological editing of different data, but in the end, we decided to keep all three existing systems (simple features, the GRASS topological model, and the PostGIS topological model). This decision was made because of the large differences in the underlying models. Of course, if someone proposes a worthy implementation of the universal mechanism, it will be gladly considered.
As QGIS has expanded from the desktop market to the web, discussions about QGIS Server and, more recently, QGIS Web Client have become an integral part of meetings. Some of the results of these discussions can be found on a dedicated wiki page.
Finally, the move to GitHub is complete: all the documentation was moved there during the hackfest. The migration was accompanied by a change in directory structure, and a description of the new workflow for translators will be published soon. There are also plans to abandon LaTeX in favour of RST (ReStructured Text), which should lower the barrier to entry for both authors and translators.
Since the preparation of new QGIS releases is quite complex and time consuming task, Tim has taken Werner on as his assistant. Tim will prepare the main releases, and Werner will do the point releases. By the way, the upcoming release 1.7.2 is his first work at this position.
As preparing new QGIS releases is a complex and time-consuming task, Tim took on Werner as his assistant. Tim will prepare the major releases and Werner will prepare the point releases. The upcoming 1.7.2 release is his first work in this position.
Strangely enough, although everyone has been talking about revising and updating the API for a long time, nothing has been broken yet (I was hoping this process would at least start at haskfest). At the same time, so much new functionality has been added that it was decided to make 1.7.2 the last release of the 1.7 series and then release 1.8.
In addition to the topics already mentioned, the following issues were also discussed to a greater or lesser extent:
- QGIS on Android
- performance testing and identification of bottlenecks in vector data handling
- new infrastructure (wiki migration, bugtracker improvements, new plugins repository, styles repository)
- revival of unit testing and the launch of the project’s Dart server
- user interface optimisation and redesign for version 2.0 (1, 2)
- overhaul of the
QgsGeometry
class (adding support for curves, splines, collections)
As for me, I was not in the mood to fix bugs, nor did I have any special plans. So I was mainly busy adding new bugs :-) by adding new tools to fTools and GdalTools.