[Qgis-developer] bugfixing for 1.5

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Tim

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Tim Sutton <lists at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>
> BTW according to our Vienna discussions there would be no more 1.x
> releases after 1.5 since we were going to try to put out 2.0 by years
> end. We were going to make 1.9.x test builds moving up to that
> release. 2.0 would be a chance to do another api clean up and rip out
> old stuff (e.g. old symbology). Is everyone still happy to progress in
> this way or does this all sound like news to you, the hackfest having
> receded into the fog of time? :-)

I have the discussion from Vienna still in my weak memory :-) We were
planning the release 2.0 about the end of this year as we thought
there will be simply no other way to keep adding new features.

My personal impression is that we are not yet in a need to release 2.0
- features continue to be added incrementally and this trend will
probably continue for some more time. If we do few more 1.x releases,
the new features would also have more time to settle down and with
release of 2.0 we will only break the API, not the whole application
:) But maybe others will not agree with me.

It would be good to gather ideas what big changes should be done in
2.0 besides the general cleanup of API. From the top of my head:
1. replace old symbology with new symbology
2. replace old labeling (no collision detection) with new labeling
(based on PAL)
3. rework handling of vector features - to allow key-less tables,
multiple keys, table joins etc.
4. rework geometries - to allow more natural and faster access to geometries

For each of these items, there are reasons to postpone the transition:
1. old symbology still has some features that new symbology doesn't have
2. old labeling is much more configurable in comparison to new labeling
3. AFAIK no work has been done yet
4. it would be great to use Boost.Geometry c++ library instead of
GEOS, but it is not yet ready for our usage

Others will probably come up with more ideas (improvements to
organization of python plugins, refactoring of raster support etc.)
Hurrying with the release of 2.0 could mean that some of the important
changes will have to kept back and wait for 3.0...

Cheers
Martin