[Qgis-developer] State of un-bundling libs from QGIS

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Volker

2011/8/4 Volker Fröhlich <volker27 at gmx.at>:
> Dear developers,
>
> today the Spatialindex package got approved for Fedora, the Qwtpolar package
> is there for one or two weeks now. Cmake lets you choose between the bundled
> version of Qwtpolar and a system wide for some time now. 2 weeks back I posted
> a patch that allows the buildsystem to use a system wide Spatialindex. In
> order to achieve that, I also had to modify the Spatialindex wrapper. You can
> find the patch here: http://hub.qgis.org/issues/4111

I will eventually get to that, not sure when... it looks fine from the
first sight.


> The remaining bundles I know of are:
>
> Name:libpal
> Website: http://geosysin.iict.ch/trac/wiki/Index4extJPAL
> Location: src/core/pal
>
> Comment:
>
> Martin Dobias did a lot of work on that one in 2009 and he and others continue
> to do so. I recently wrote to Olivier Ertz, who is one of the original
> authors, whether he was still interested in the library and interested in
> merging the improvements upstream. I can try to help in this process, but I
> don't know if I'm any help.

It seems that libpal is not maintained by the original authors
anymore. I would be happy to see new upstream releases with the
changes we have done in our fork. However the current situation is
quite fine for us because we can do modifications / bugfixes to libpal
whenever needed and do not worry about conflicting versions, ABI/API
stability and other stuff. Therefore I do not think some moves will
happen unless someone starts maintaining upstream libpal.


> Name: qextserialport
> Name: qtermwidget
> Name: nmealib

These are quite small libraries and relativle mature ones (i.e. not
much development is going on), so bundling them in QGIS sources makes
sense. Using them as separate libraries would cause more headache than
fun to users and developers.

Regards
Martin