[QGIS-Developer] using conda for development

[Greg Troxel]

Ari Meyer <ari.meyer at gmail.com> writes:

> Matthias, WADR, your statement seems, at least on the surface, to indicate
> an incredibly fragile process.  How can you possibly maintain stability and
> reproducibility if the dependencies can be changed at will?

I can understand how you would say this, but I find your statement odd
from an open source development norms viewpoint.   It is entirely
typical for a project to specify a list of dependencies with a miniumu
version (because of API changes), with the notion that if built against
that version or later, all will be ok.  That leads to the application
being judged buggy, if it doesn't cope, and the dependency being judged
buggy, if it doesn't meet the interface specification.   Certainly
hard-core testing will be against particular versions.  The history of
open source projects is that usually things are ok with this fuzzy >=
binding.

In my little corner, qgis makes releases, and they are built within
pkgsrc, which means against whatever version is in pkgsrc that minute.
Aside from upstream instability of some packages, this is mostly ok.

I have only been using qgis the last month or two, but have been lurking
and thinking about packaging for much longer.  I am curious how many
documented cases of incompatibilitiies due to versions of something --
when the qgis build says both are acceptable -- there have been, and if
in hindsight the bug is in qgis or the dependency.