[Qgis-community-team] Removing third party providers algorithms from QGIS Docs

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 07/02/2018 11:08 PM, DelazJ wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I wonder if this had not been discussed in the past but I would like to
> raise it again as I faced the issue this week-end: other than QGIS
> algorithm help files, our documentation [0] contains descriptions for
> some third-party providers for which I think we should revisit whether
> it's worth to have them:
> - *GDAL*: when you press Help button of a gdal raster algorithm (except
> gdal2xyz's 404), it brings you to gdal official doc. when you press a
> vector alg help button, you get the less sexy ogr2ogr page. Do we need
> to keep our own docs if we do not advertize them? Note that I found some
> missing parameters in our docs.
> 
> I do not enable third-party agorithms to check where the help buttons
> brings you but:
> -*SAGA*: it has its own documentation website and in ours, parameters
> are not described
> - *OTB*: same thing, it has its own website and our website is rather empty
> - *R*: ditto
> - *Lastools*: better described than the others but still, a lot of
> undescribed parameters
> - *TauDEM*: fully documented afaics in our pages.
> 
> *GRASS*: we do not document it and from memory, in 2.x we already relied
> on GRASS official docs.
> 
> So given the state of those docs, do we really need to keep them?
> 
> [0]
> https://docs.qgis.org/testing/en/docs/user_manual/processing_algs/index.html

Hi Harrissou,

Thanks for bringing this up.

I know that those processing alg help pages are programmatically(?)
generated by Alexander B (in bcc), because we did not have anything
there, and it that way we at least had the list of parameters. The idea
was that humans then could add more information. We had some discussion
at that time to either put it all in separate files, or group them or
one file (we started with separate files, exploding the number of
resources for transifex).

In general: having our own docs gives us a chance to have some
consistency, add our own text and images, they are translatable and
potentially to be packaged in an offline help package (still on the todo
list :-) ).

But we should(!) link to them from within QGIS, else I agree we should
get rid of the burden to maintain them.

It is a community choice, I think, if in QGIS we should be linking to
third-party docs or linking to QGIS docs (which then can link to the
third-party docs).

We (as QGIS) really have a problem maintaining the docs.
People outside the community often complain about sparce documentation,
but (even with funding) we have problems keeping them up to date with
the developers. We really need more help, both from developers (which
more often should write some lines in the commit messages) and from
users (which could try to write some text).
Not sure if extra funding would help...

Others?

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde