[Qgis-developer] new_vector_api merged

[Martin Dobias]

Hi everyone

I'm pleased to announce that new_vector_api branch has been merged to
master. From user's point of view there should be ideally no change -
everything should work as before, except for various plugins that will
need update to support new API. With such extent of refactoring of
vector layer code it is possible that some new bugs have been
introduced - I hope there won't be any serious problems. I would like
to ask people to test master branch with various data providers and
report any regressions related to vector handling (e.g. access to
data, editing or joins).

I have also created a tag "Before-merge-new_vector_api" that points to
the last commit on master before the merge - in case someone would
like to stick with pre-merge code for some reason.

What's next?
osm, mssql and sqlanywhere providers are currently disabled - but they
should be adapted to new API and re-enabled soon by their respective
authors. QgsVectorLayer still has old API methods (select(),
nextFeature() and featureAtId()). There are more than a hundred of
these call just in QGIS code base. I have marked them as deprecated
now - we should slowly get rid of them and finally remove them before
2.0.

Of course the most awaited feature is the threaded rendering -
experimental support should be coming in the following months, so
please stay tuned.

One of the next steps will be already mentioned move to newer sip/PyQt
APIs for common classes like QString and QVariant that will simplify
plugins' code and make them more ready for python3 (where the new APIs
will be default). I would also like to look into support of python3,
so that ideally QGIS 2.0 could be built either with python2 or
python3. I expect that QGIS 2.0 will stick to python2 and QGIS 3.0
will use python3.

Looking forward to the feedback from testing!

Regards
Martin