[QGIS-Developer] Future of OTB provider plugin?

[Matthias Kuhn]

+1

Matthias

On Sun, Nov 12, 2023 at 10:39 PM Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer <
qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> I'd like to kick start some discussions about the future of the official
> OTB Processing Provider plugin which comes pre-installed with QGIS.
>
> As you may or may not be aware of, the Processing maintainers have been on
> a multi-year quest to slim down the core set of out-of-the-box providers.
> The biggest consequences of these have been the demotion of the Processing
> R Providers and SAGA providers to 3rd party, community maintained plugins.
>
> The main motivations behind this are:
>
> - Making sure that all the out of the box tools "just work" consistently
> across different platforms, without requiring users to install additional
> software.
> - Easing the maintenance burden on the core QGIS team -- by moving these
> plugins to community maintained repositories, we lower the barrier of entry
> for contributors to these plugins.
> - Avoiding issues with "tight coupling" of 3rd party tools to QGIS
> versions. This was especially the case with the SAGA provider, where it
> proved impossible to keep a stable plugin which worked consistently across
> the range of SAGA versions installable on different platforms. (The 3rd
> party SAGA NG plugin avoids this by ALWAYS targeting the most recent SAGA
> version, and leaving it as the user's responsibility for installing this
> version. We didn't have the same flexibility when the SAGA provider was a
> core part of QGIS).
>
> I'd like to now focus on the out-of-the-box OTB Processing provider, and
> personally I would like to see this one demoted to a community maintained
> plugin.
>
> My reasons are:
> 1. The provider has not seen development efforts outside of "keep this
> running only" by the usual QGIS committers. I would hope to see the same
> results as we saw with the R and SAGA plugins where moving to community
> maintained plugins increases the number of outside contributions.
> 2. OTB requires a separate installation outside of QGIS, and isn't easily
> available on many supported QGIS platforms (eg there's no Fedora package).
>  3. The OTB installer does some weird thing in the QGIS ci environment,
> which make me nervous:
>
> 2023-11-12T12:54:48.9064680Z #26 18.57 warning: working around a Linux kernel bug by creating a hole of 20480 bytes in ‘./lib/libQt5Core.so.5.10.1’
>
> So... what does everyone else think? Can we safely demote OTB to a 3rd
> party plugin and remove it for QGIS 3.36?
>
> Nyall
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