[Qgis-developer] Time for 1.0 API freeze

[Martin Dobias]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 10:28 PM, Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>> > From the PSC meeting we will temporarily unfreeze trunk to allow
>> > improved labelling to be added, so I will hold on for API freeze until
>> > after that - feel free to tweak on if you spot inconistencies in the
>> > mean time!
>>
>> When will this happen the inclusion happen? isn't improved labeling
>> scheduled for 1.1?
>
> It was but the feeling at the PSC meeting was that we should unfreeze
> trunk for labelling (not a general unfreeze) and get label collision
> detection in before we API freeze and release QGIS 1.0. Still to be
> decided who / how we will implement it. I was wondering if we could use
> graphics scene collision detection. Do they still have that or was it
> lost in move from canvas? We are still hoping for a december release
> though not sure if that will be possible...

Well... there's practical problem - who will implement it :-) It's not
something that one can develop in two days. There are more problems I
see:
- the release will be shifted again and again. Real release date can
be moved to March or so
- long feature freeze is not good
- we're parting the original idea of frequent releases
I understand that good labeling is quite important but if there isn't
any code, waiting for full (and bug-free) implementation can take
ages. Please re-think this!

And there are even more reasons to release soon - we're on halfway
between 0.11 and 1.0. There's evolving community around python
plugins, people are trying plugins or developing new ones. You can see
that without proper 1.0 release there will be quite some problems with
incompatibility - like nowadays, every few days someone posts a mail
about plugins that are not working because of API changes. 1.0 release
will have checks for incompatible plugins so this problem will go away
quickly.

Regarding your question about graphics scene - yes there is collision
detection. Qt uses BSP tree indexing. But I'm not convinced that it
has be used for labeling. We can use spatial indexing based on R-tree
included in qgis core library. I don't know which one is faster for
this kind of use.

Martin