[osgeo4w-dev] QGIS 3.18.0 and QGIS 3.14.4 (LTR) packages released and OSGeo4W reboot

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi there,

I'm happy to announce that the QGIS packages of 3.16.4 (LTR) 'Hannover' and the
our latest release 3.18.0 'Zürich' are ready on
https://qgis.org/de/site/forusers/download.html.  This includes Linux, Mac and
Windows packages.  With the availability of a new regular release the current
long-term release 3.16 replaces the previous long-term release 3.10 in the long
term package repositories.

The Windows standalone installer are as usual made from the OSGeo4W packages.

In OSGeo4W there has lately been a big effort to reboot it, meaning that it has 
been completely rebuilt using newer source versions of mostly every package 
using a newer compiler.  As this happened shortly before the QGIS release the
new packages are still in a separate repository for testing.

You can install them using the osgeo4w installer on
http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/testing/osgeo4w-setup.exe (note the testing -
the old installer will also work, if you point it to the new site, but it will
default to the old).

Within the reboot a lot of old packages were dropped (including dependencies to 
old microsoft runtimes), new packages were introduced and also package names
were revised.

Long story short: you cannot upgrade from old installs and have to remove and
reinstall or use a separate directory.  As the new OSGeo4W only supports 64bit
the default root directory was changed to C:\OSGeo4W, which might help with
that if you were on 64bit earlier.

Also note that it now only has one version of Python - namely 3.9, which
doesn't support Windows 7 anymore.  Other updates include Qt 5.15, GDAL 3.2,
PROJ 7.2 and SAGA 7.8.

It also has PDAL 2.2 which is required for native support of point clouds in 
QGIS - something that you find lacking in the "old" OSGeo4W repository and in
turn in the current standalones.

The new installer also doesn't require administrator privileges anymore.  
Unless you run it elevated (ie. as Administrator) the option to create 
shortcuts for all users will be unavailable.

The testing repository will eventually replace the old repository and also be
used to make standalone installers.   As it has grown to exceed the 2GB limit 
of NSIS the standalone installers will then be switched to MSI.

The package recipes currently reside at https://github.com/jef-n/OSGeo4W.

Please test and report packaging issues to the OSGeo4W TRAC at
https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w.



Jürgen

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden            https://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode
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