[Qgis-developer] Re: Proposal: Lift feature freeze for labelling

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Tim

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 11:45 PM, Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> If you cast your mind back to our feature plans for QGIS 1.0, one
> sorely needed improvement is a better labelling engine. During the
> FOSS4G conference, I came across just such a project [1] where they
> have implemented just such a labelling engine in C++. This api also
> has a JNI interface and has been used in sextant / gvSIG via an
> extension (see [2]). Martin I know you had plans to do some work in
> this area - have you started anything yet?

I must say I'm impressed by this project. Looking at the slides from
foss4g presentation, it looks they've implemented quite a lot from the
things I would implement by myself and even in the way I wanted to do
it too (e.g. they're referencing A. Wolff's combinatorial approach).

I haven't started with labeling implementation, I've just considered
doing that for my master thesis... but it looks like I'll have to
search for another topic :-)

> Since 1.0 will promise a stable API, and we have a golden opportunity
> here to incorporate proper labelling before we finalise the 1.0 API, I
> would like to propose that we revoke the feature freeze termporarily
> in order to allow us to incorporate the work of the PAL library.
> Marco and I will look at the feasibility of incorporating the PAL
> library into QGIS, and what kind of effect it would have on the API
> during the FOSS4G code sprint on saturday.

Incorporating PAL would be probably a good step forward. But I can
imagine that we could do that also as an incremental change - although
that would mean that we keep the old labeling engine in place.

One thing I'm affraid of is the license - GPLv3. Any ideas about v2
and v3 compatibility?

Regards
Martin