QGIS hackfest 2012 (Lyon)

19.04.2012 13:58 ·  Notes  ·  qgis, meetings

The 7th QGIS developers meeting held in Lyon (France) has ended.

The first day was rather uneventful - the host university had problems with the electricity, and besides, almost everyone arrived in Lyon in the afternoon. The following days were more intense: presentations, discussions on various aspects of the project, and, of course, coding.

Presentations:

• Victor Olaya — SEXTANTE for QGIS
• Pirmin Kalberer — Creating plugin for SEXTANTE
• Michael Duchin — Lizmap
• interviews with some participants

Discussed topics:

• finances. If we leave out all the figures and details, the picture is as follows: costs are rising, but the balance is still positive
• release model. The idea of multiple release branches has been abandoned, and all new releases will be made from the main tree. Release branches will only be used as “markers”, and to fix critical bugs (like the epic extent bug) after a release. Non-critical bugfixes will not be backported. There will be a freeze period (both for code and strings) before a release on the master branch.
• more transparent, targeted funding (more details)
• QGIS-friendly courses
• migrating documentation from LaTeX to RST and setting up an online platform for translators. Actually, the migration has already started with the QGIS User Manual. The plan is to convert all project documentation to RST format
• improving the testing infrastructure. New tests for different parts of the code have been added, and a testing server has been setup

Among the topics discussed were also the upcoming GSoC, integration of some 3rd-party plugins into the core (DB Manager was already integrated at the time of writing), API changes, and so on.