[Qgis-psc] Survey results

[Giovanni Manghi]

Hi!


> One thing that strikes me is the need for additional functions: contrary
> to my expectations, many users do not find QGIS feature complete, and
> have to recur to other sw to complete their job.
> This may be due to real lack of functionalities or, as Andreas pointed
> out, to lack of knowledge about new, somewhat hidden, tools.
> Given that, it is not surprising that the highst priority is given to
> new features rather than, as most of us expected, to bugfixing.
> Discovering whether this is due to lack of functions or lack of
> communication / documentation is, I think, crucial for the project.

it is surprising for us (people who know every corner of the program),
but if we think about common/basic users it is not. A few examples:

* there are tons of functionalities available as plugins but
common/basic users rarely know they exists (because often they do not
have the time to explore them). The functionalities added by this
plugins are so important and "basic" (meaning that is expected to have
them out of the box) that we should really consider to add them into
QGIS core:

Table manager
Group stats + statist
Value tool
Numerical vertex edit
Numerical digitize

(all the above are very long tenured and tested plugins)

One of the plugins to make DEM profiles

probably a few others


* An INSPIRE ready metadata editor

* Some love for the raster georefrencer



* A lot of people would like to use QGIS to make simple geoprocessing
operations (clips, intersections, etc.) using what QGIS offers out of
the box. We still have issues with this area, with tools that at each
release go broke or (worst) they return wrong results. Moreover the
speed of this tools is usually very bad with large/complex inputs. If
we don't find a way to improve this area we will always have users
that will have to use other software to do "basic" gis operations.


cheers!

-- G --