QGIS hackfest 2014 (Essen) recap

06.10.2014 17:34 ·  Notes  ·  qgis, travels, meetings

The 12th QGIS developers meeting, which took place in Essen (Germany), has ended.

In my previous posts (day 1, day 2, and day 3), I have already covered the main points, and now I will go into a little more detail about the most interesting results.

Certification

Four types of certificates are planned: QGIS User, QGIS Professional, QGIS Trainer, and QGIS Developer. Also, PSC will issue so-called “grandfather” certificates. The TAO online platform will be used for assessments.

New geometry class

A complete update of the QgsGeometry class, which is responsible for the spatial component of objects, is planned:

• support for an extended set of geometric primitives
• support for Z (altitude) and M (measurement) values
• support for curves
• new extensible architecture
• an extensive set of unit-tests

The first batch of changes has already been implemented, and new functionality is expected to be included in the QGIS 2.7 code base. The work was supported by the Canton of Solothurn.

In fact, there were many more interesting and active discussions, and some topics appeared on the agenda spontaneously (for example, support for SAGA and OTB in Processing on Debian builds). In addition to broad discussions, there were also “narrow” discussions where specialized problems were solved (such as downloading data from the Portuguese iGeo portal), and participants periodically organized into groups to solve problems together and/or find and fix bugs.

Also during the meeting:

• we discussed changes to the release schedule: it is proposed to maintain the LTS release with a 1 year lifecycle
• support for Python plugins for the QGIS Server was proposed and partially implemented. This way, one can significantly expand the functionality of the server without the need to make changes to its code
• we discussed the prospects of fTools (vector data) and GDALTools (raster data) plug-ins and their possible replacement with Processing
• PSC completed process of the trademark registration and developed guidelines for its use
• we started work on integrating contextual help into the documentation
• lots of bugs were fixed
• documentation was updated

Many thanks to the organizers and LinuxHotel staff for their hospitality.