[Qgis-developer] fTools (Vector) concern

[Carson Farmer]

A response:

> I'm very disappointed  with  fTools (Vector) and when I say 'I'
> unfortunately I reflect an opinion of a larger community.
I'm terribly sorry to hear this, and this is certainly not the
feedback I've been getting in my email inbox, otherwise I would have
asked for help sooner.

> At  the  our bug hunt and continuously after I believe 50% of the bugs
> we  found were from fTools (and this is very considerable number, trac
> regulars  for sure can tell). We've raised some seriously disappointed
> comments like "Nothing works in Vector menu". I simply couldn't test
> Simplify features because it doesn't work, as well. Everytime I (or
> other people from our group) open an instrument from Vector, there is a string of bugs to
> fill and this is very tiring and very bad looking in places where we
> try to make people move from some GIS to QGIS.
Unfortunately, many of these comments aren't very helpful, and
obviously aren't making it into track. I had a quick look just now,
and as far as I can tell, only a fraction of the reported bugs have
anything to do with fTools (though I'll certainly admit there are
fTools bug reports there).

> I suggest that a serious review of Vector tools is needed (hackfest?), first by
> maintainer, then by a single user checking _all_ instruments under
> both Win and Linux. This can be followed by a group effort to hunt for
> more bugs (here I offer our help).
I will not be at the hackfest this time, as I simply don't have time
at the moment. However, I strongly encourage others to take a look at
the fTools functions and get cracking! Unfortunately I have received
very few patches or fixes to fTools in general since it's inclusion in
trunk, and I simply do not have the time to implement these
changes/fixes on my own. fTools is a very complex plugin, and since it
is dealing with complicated geometry manipulations, bugs from fTools,
QGIS, and GEOS (and the conversion between all these pieces) all
affect it. As I have mentioned in the past, I would love to have more
people working on it, especially the (very slow) port of the fTools
Python functions to cpp. I'm not a cpp programmer, so by myself things
move very slowly... In terms of the hackfest, I would love to have
someone (or more) take some initiative and continue work on porting
things over and cleaning things up.

Regards,

Carson

-- 
Carson J. Q. Farmer
ISSP Doctoral Fellow
National Centre for Geocomputation
National University of Ireland, Maynooth,
http://www.carsonfarmer.com/