<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi PSC<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I have written up a draft announcement about the 3.0 plan. I am including a complete draft below.. Please let me know if you have comments, corrections, additions to this DRAFT so that I can post it and then advertise it more broadly.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">COPY BEGINS</div><div class="">— ——— — ———— </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">QGIS 3.0 plans</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Ok so quick spoiler here: there is no QGIS 3.0 ready yet, nor will there be a QGIS 3.0 for some time. This article provides a bit more detail on the plans for QGIS 3.0. A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the considerations for the 3.0 release, so you may want to <a data-mce-href="http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/" href="http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/" style="color: rgb(0, 170, 220);" class="">read that first</a> before continuing with this article as I do not cover the same ground here.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">A <strong class="">lot</strong> of consideration has gone into deciding what the approach will be for the development of QGIS 3.0. Unfortunately the first PSC vote regarding which proposal to follow was a <a data-mce-href="https://www.loomio.org/d/5MCdPwoL/vote-to-approve-the-process-for-qgis-3-0" href="https://www.loomio.org/d/5MCdPwoL/vote-to-approve-the-process-for-qgis-3-0" style="color: rgb(0, 170, 220);" class="">split</a> decision (4 for, 3 against, 1 abstention and 1 suggestion for an alternative in the discussion). During our PSC meeting this week we re-tabled the topic and eventually agreed on Jürgen Fischer's proposal (Jürgen is a QGIS PSC Member and the QGIS Release Manager) by a much more unanimous margin of 8 for, 1 neutral and 1 absent. Jürgen's proposal is largely similar to the Proposal 2 described in my <a data-mce-href="http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/" href="http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/" style="color: rgb(0, 170, 220);" class="">previous posting</a>. I want to make some special notes here about our discussion and subsequent decision which will hopefully help to clarify the thinking behind our decision for other interested observers. First let me lay out Jürgen's plan in his own words:<br class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">"</span><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">My preferred approach would still be:</span></p><ul style="color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><li data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">Do a Qt5/PyQt5/Python3 branch in parallel, actually work on it until it's ready, make it master and release it as 3.0</span></li><li data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">Meantime keep working on master (2.x) and keep releasing them every 4 months as usual</span></li></ul><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">Everyone can work on the branch (s)he wants (or is hired to), but needs to consider if (s)he want to do it (or spend funds on):</span></p><ul style="color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><li data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">only for 2.x: knowing that it will be released soon; but might become unusable because platforms drop support for stuff it depends on sooner or later</span></li><li data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">only for 3.x: not knowing when that will ever release or</span></li><li data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">for both: knowing that work needs to be done twice.</span></li><li data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class=""><span data-mce-style="font-weight: 400;" class="">People adding features to the master branch will be responsible to ensure that their work gets merged to 3.0 branch.</span></li></ul><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">As PSC we should maintain the environment for people to do something for QGIS - but we cannot tell them to - so we don't have resources we can actually plan with and that means we can either release something when the big thing is ready or what we have in fixed intervals." - Jürgen Fischer<br class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">What follows are some further details and clarifications to our preferred approach:</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><strong class="">Why do parallel development?</strong><br class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Parallel development of 3.0 maintaining our master branch with 2.x code in it has advantages and disadvantages. First the advantages:</p><ul style="color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><li class="">If we encounter major technical difficulties / release blockers in the 3.0 branch, it will not impact on our normal 3 monthly release cycle.</li><li class="">Our binary build systems (Linux, Windows and OSX binaries) will be unaffected until 3.0 is ready.</li><li class="">It is very likely that building 3.0 binaries on different platforms is going to have difficulties for each platform. For example OSGEO4W has no Python3 and Qt5 packages yet. Someone needs to see to the creation of the required package as a separate exercise from the actuals development of a version of QGIS that will take advantage of these updated libraries. We don't yes know what problems may be in countered in preparing these.</li><li class="">"Don't break what already works": we have a working and relatively stable master branch and we don't want to do a 'cowboy stunt' and break it. We prefer to wait until the 3.0 branch is mature, has passing tests and is known to work well before merging it into master and treating it as our 'best we currently have' master branch.</li></ul><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Of course nothing in life is completely easy, there are also some disadvantages<strong class="">:</strong></p><ul style="color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><li class="">Some developers may feel that running two mainstream branches is dilution of effort. To counter this, our public recommendation is that after 2.16 comes out, all QGIS contributors are <strong class="">strongly encouraged</strong> to provide their patches against the 3.0 branch. Any features applied to the master branch is <strong class="">not guaranteed</strong> to be part of the 3.0 release.</li><li class="">Regular merging of master to the 3.0 branch may prove more and more difficult over time as the two branches diverge more. Again we will strongly encourage that developers submitting new features after the 2.16 release do so against the 3.0 branch.</li><li class="">3.0 branch won't have auto build system for nightly binaries in the beginning. Since we expect that the initial branch of 3.0 will break these anyway, Having a separate branch is actually an advantage here as it will give binary packages some time to get their build systems up to speed.</li></ul><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br data-mce-bogus="1" class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><strong class="">The schedule will not be fixed:</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">One thing that we want to make really clear (and was a key point in our many discussions) is that there will be no fixed release date for QGIS version 3.0. There are several reasons for this:</p><ul style="color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><li class="">As a steering committee, we can only set the QGIS ship pointing in a given direction, our power to actually make work happen is extremely limited. This is because we are a community made up largely of volunteer developers or developers working on a commission basis for third party clients. We have no say in how these contributors spend their time. </li><li class="">We do not yet know which (if any) major technical issues will be encountered during the development of 3.0. Any such issues could very well delay the roll our of QGIS 3.0.</li></ul><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Instead our plan is to make the 2.16 release and then effectively move all developer effort to the 3.0 branch as best we can (through close liaison with our developer community).</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br data-mce-bogus="1" class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><strong class="">Looking forward to 3.0</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Personally I am very much looking forward to the release of QGIS 3.0 - it represents another huge milestone in our project, it affords us a great opportunity to get rid of a lot of cruft out of our code base and API's and it will arm us with a set of modern, new libraries that will see us through the next several years. Rock on QGIS 3.0!</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br data-mce-bogus="1" class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><img class="wp-image-124 size-full alignnone" alt="timsutton" width="336" height="191" data-mce-src="https://qgisblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/timsutton.png" style="max-width: 100%;" apple-inline="yes" id="317BE41C-4378-4437-8A76-392F93A5815E" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" src="cid:6DE65B70-BC3D-4F62-8301-60FBDD449E21"></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">QGIS PSC Chairman</p><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">——————</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">COPY ENDS</div><div class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: center;" class=""><span>—</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: center;" class=""><span><br class=""></span></div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><span><img height="66" width="160" apple-inline="yes" id="30737912-AA99-45C7-A622-4733D68CE140" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" src="cid:62C890D4-3964-4609-BDE6-7536D5FBDD70" class=""></span><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: center;" class=""><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br class=""></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: center;" class="">Tim Sutton</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: center;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><div style="text-align: center;" class="">Visit <a href="http://kartoza.com" class="">http://kartoza.com</a> to find out about open source:</div><div style="text-align: center;" class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div style="text-align: center;" class="">* Desktop GIS programming services</div><div style="text-align: center;" class="">* Geospatial web development</div><div style="text-align: center;" class="">* GIS Training</div><div style="text-align: center;" class="">* Consulting Services</div><div style="text-align: center;" class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div style="text-align: center;" class="">Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at <a href="http://freenode.net" class="">freenode.net</a></div><div style="text-align: center;" class="">Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee</div><div style="text-align: center;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="text-align: center;" class="">Kartoza is a merger between Linfiniti and Afrispatial</div></div></div></div>
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