[Qgis-developer] Re: composer redesign branch

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Tim

On Feb 12, 2008 10:36 AM, Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com> wrote:
> Hi Martin and others
>
> Martin I agree your listed options will be a better design. Im just
> worried about time scales (we need to get 1.0 out this year - and
> ideally before sept in time for FOSS4GEO2008)

Well, since I haven't seen any release plan, I wasn't worried about
time scales... but getting 1.0 out in september doesn't look like a
challenge - depending on what all should be included in it. Tim, as
release manager, would you mind preparing such thing? (e.g. what
releases are planned, when, and possibly what features should be
targeted)

> and about the fact that
> Gavin may be off at sea, having set some contractors to work on
> composer stuff.

Hm, I didn't know anything about Gavin's plans for the map composer...
is the coding already taking place or what's the phase?


> The other nice thing about the design change is that
> raster and vector will work in similar way (both using renderers) if I
> understand things right.

Actually I've been talking mainly about vector renderers, although
rasters should be easy to do too.

> a) how long will it take

I guess the longest part will be the design stage (so that we won't
have to do the changes to it in longer time). If I start with coding I
expect to finish it in two weeks or so. In fact the code changes for
this stuff are not going to be that great as it might look like. The
changes should be done in following order:
1. rendering context - this is just matter of packing the arguments
for rendering to a class
2. renderers - time for this depends on final design
3. map composer changes - consists of separating frontend and backend
and then moving backend to core library


> b) who is willing to work on this

I will be happy to participate, don't know so far about others...

> c) do others agree to trying to get this implemented in 1.0

The question for others...


> One important thing is to really try to consider render performance in
> any redisign. QGIS has been steadily getting slower at rendering
> vectors over the last few years and it would be good to try to address
> this before 1.0 goes out.

Yes I completely agree, I don't want to do any changes that would make
QGIS slower.

Martin