News from QGIS HackFest in Las Palmas

by filed under GIS, QGIS.
News from QGIS HackFest in Las Palmas

Last week I’ve spent a few days in Las Palmas at the QGIS Hack Fest. Here are my personal notes about the event .

First I wish to thank Pablo & friends for the amazing organization, unfortunately I couldn’t spend more than two full days there, but those two days have been memorable! Here is a picture of one of the most interesting discussions (photo: courtesy of Pablo). QGIS discussion at the developer meeting in Las Palmas An hack fest is an event for writing good code but what it’s really good at is to establish and cultivate relations with other coders, to exchange opinions and ideas and last but not least to have some fun and make new friends.   This time, we have had many interesting presentations and a couple of meetings where we spoke about technical aspects of the project management and infrastructure and about some important challenges, both in terms of code size and economical implications for who relies on it, that a growing project must face.   The latter was something I’ve also been considering for a while: now that pull requests (PR) for new features are coming down the pipeline, we must find a better way to manage their queue by giving a clear and transparent approval path and deadline. This management and approval process cannot rely entirely on volunteer work, the main reason being that most of the times the PR proposers have been paid for that PR and it’s not fair (nor reliable) that the (sometimes hard) job of doing a code review is not rewarded. On the other end, an investor cannot waste its time and money on a project without having a reasonable good chance to see its work eventually land into the core of QGIS.   Hugo (thanks for that!) organized a meeting to discuss this topic, that crosses personal business interests, ethical considerations and personal beliefs to a point that it’s not really easy to discuss in a calm and objective way, despite the premises, the discussion was very interesting and constructive and a QEP that tries to address at least some of this problems is open for discussion right now: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/52   Another topic we’ve been discussing was how to manage python plugin dependencies, we’ve decided to start by adding a new metadata tag called external_deps that’s supposed to contain the PIP install string for the required packages, since PIP will be a builtin in python 3.4, that will probably solve most of our problems when we’ll integrate that into the plugin manager. At the moment the metadata is not documented nor required, but it’s there to allow for experiments.   We didn’t miss the occasion to talk about the ugly bug that affects fTools, not something I’m going to dig into in this post though.   Of course an hack fest is still a good opportunity for squashing bugs and implement new cool features, I’ve been busy mainly on the following topics:
  1. HiDPI screen support for web view widgets (help and plugin manager/installer)
  2. Form relations editing longstanding bugs
  3. New feature to optionally enter, edit and store Python form init code into the project (and DB), see the picture below
  4. Plugins website maintenance (added new metadata and fixed a few bugs, added an RPC call to export author email for admins)
New QGIS feature to store form init code   Thanks to all participants, to the organizers and to all QGIS sponsors and donors that made this possible!  

4 Responses to “News from QGIS HackFest in Las Palmas”

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1.  Retour sur le Hackfest Qgis de Las Palmas | GIS-Blog.fr