Translated PyQGIS Developer Cookbook into Ukrainian. Soon it will be available on the QGIS documentation portal.
Comments and constructive criticism are welcome. Or even better, create an account and edit directly in Transifex
(although I personally don’t like it much and translate locally: git + Qt Linguist are the best).
The 11th QGIS developers meeting, held in Vienna (Austria), has finished. This time, the hackfest took place under the umbrella of a larger developer meeting — OSGeo Code Sprint 2014.
The activity of the participants was at a traditionally high level, and there is no sense or possibility to describe everything. Among the most notable things from an end-user prospective are:
bug hunting in Processing (Anita Graser and myself)
updated plugins repository (Alessandro Pasotti)
Paolo Cavallini was busy with checking and approving piles of submitted plugins
updated user manual (Larissa Junek and Otto Dassau)
There were also discussions about:
procedures for creating regional QGIS user groups
another stage of refactoring (this time it was about the layer tree or ToC, Table of Contents)
user interface improvements
translation process for documentation and user interface (Transifex vs. Qt Linguist/GitHub)
integration of the MetaSearch plugin into the core
At last! QGIS has finally got support for multithreaded rendering, the corresponding changes were merged into master by Martin Dobias just an hour ago. This is basically a revival of the 2010 GSoC project “QGIS on steroids” (successfully completed, but never merged into master), taking into account the latest changes to the QGIS codebase.
By default, multithreaded rendering is disabled, one can enable it in the QGIS settings “Settings → Options → Rendering → Render layers in parallel using all available CPU cores”. It is also possible to set canvas refresh interval during rendering (0 means real-time updates).
The 5th QGIS developer meeting, which according to the QGIS Wiki gathered 28 people in Lisbon (Portugal), is coming to an end. It is time to summarise the results and share impressions.
Unfortunately, I was not able to attend in person and had to participate virtually again.
As the code and strings are currently frozen, people have mainly been fixing bugs and cleaning up the bug tracker. No new functionality (at least visible to normal users) has been added.
Most of the first day was spent getting things up and running, with more or less active work only starting on Friday evening. Saturday, however, was a real blast: in addition to closing tickets and fixing bugs, several presentations were given:
Martin Dobias demonstrated the QGIS FileBrowser data management application. It is similar to ArcCatalog in some ways, but all such applications look pretty much the same
Radim Blazek presented the QGIS Customisation project, which allows you to flexibly customise the QGIS interface and save those changes to a file for use on other machines
Jean-Roc Morreale spoke about the French version of the QGIS User Guide, which is available in printed form via the Print-On-Demand (PoD) service. It is expected that all translations of the User Guide and other documentation will be distributed using this technology in the future
Vincent Picavet showed the Rumbler plugin, which allows you to add new layers to QGIS directly from PgAdmin
there was a small demo of the DTClassifier plugin I’m currently working on. This plugin is being developed for a forestry monitoring project and provides image classification and change detection functionality
Julien Malik spoke for more than an hour about OrfeoToolbox and the prospects of its integration with QGIS
We also discussed many other topics, including migrating to Git, starting a new plugins repository, further development of QGIS, and redesigning the user interface.
Some numbers. At the time of writing: 64 issues closed, 59 commits made, 26 new issues opened. By the way, the bug #7 has been fixed, and the place of the oldest issue now belongs to #40.
In my opinion, this hackfest was a bit sluggish and not as lively as the previous ones. I hope that the feature freeze is to blame and that the next meeting (in autumn in Switzerland) will be more active.
A long and very active discussion and comparison of the functionality of QGIS and Manifold has led to the creation of another page on the QGIS wiki: “How to do that in QGIS”. Here we will publish step-by-step instructions for solving various tasks in the latest version of QGIS.
It is intended that these instructions will supplement the existing documentation and replace outdated HowTo’s scattered around the web. Everyone is invited to contribute content.
What many of us have been waiting for has finally happened: Radim Blazek has just merged the raster_providers branch into trunk. Raster reprojection is now a reality.
QGIS is evolving fast: The API is extended, new features appear, and functionality that was previously implemented as plugins is added to the core. This was the case with the raster calculator, and now it is the turn of fTools.
For those who don’t know, fTools is a set of tools for vector data processing (analysis, management, and geoprocessing). Originally developed as a plugin, at some point it was integrated into QGIS (menu “Vector”, and earlier “fTools”).
After merging code from the table_join branch into the main development tree, the “Join attributes” tool is no longer needed; the “Export to new projection” tool is successfully replaced by the “Save as” functionality. These tools have already been removed, as well as the About dialogue box and help files.
There is an ongoing discussion about removing the “Export/Add Geometry column” (you can get area, perimeter and coordinates using the Field Calculator) and “Select by Location” tools (there is a more powerful Spatial Query core plugin).
The new QGIS plugin repository, which was discussed at the latest developer meeting in Wrocław, is now available for testing at https://plugins.qgis.org. Everyone is welcome to try it out, login with your OSGeo ID. Any problems should be reported to https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Django.
There is also a separate bug tracker for plugins, which can also be accessed using the OSGeo ID.
More information about the new plugin repository can be found on the QGIS Wiki.
At the last QGIS developer meeting in Wrocław we discussed the migration from SVN to Git. There was even a small workshop on using Git at the hackfest. The final decision on this topic has not yet been made, but it will be discussed again at the next meeting in Lisbon.
For those who want to try Git in action, there are several QGIS mirrors on GitHub (one, two) that can be used for development. Gary Sherman has written a good post on how to do this.
Another option is to use git-svn. This eliminates the need to create an account on GitHub and is a good option if you just want to try Git but still want to use your SVN working copy for a while. This is the option I chose.
First, we need to obtain sources, starting with some revision
If necessary, revision 15000 can be replaced with another revision. Now you can cd into the qgis directory and use all the features of git: create local branches, make and commit changes, etc. When everything is ready to be committed back to trunk, use the following command