[Qgis-developer] State of un-bundling libs from QGIS

[Volker Fröhlich]

Dear developers,

today the Spatialindex package got approved for Fedora, the Qwtpolar package 
is there for one or two weeks now. Cmake lets you choose between the bundled 
version of Qwtpolar and a system wide for some time now. 2 weeks back I posted 
a patch that allows the buildsystem to use a system wide Spatialindex. In 
order to achieve that, I also had to modify the Spatialindex wrapper. You can 
find the patch here: http://hub.qgis.org/issues/4111

I'd like to build Fedora's QGIS with the external Qwtpolar and Spatialindex, 
but would like to have your review on the patch first, since I am not a 
programmer.

The remaining bundles I know of are:

Name:libpal
Website: http://geosysin.iict.ch/trac/wiki/Index4extJPAL
Location: src/core/pal

Comment:

Martin Dobias did a lot of work on that one in 2009 and he and others continue 
to do so. I recently wrote to Olivier Ertz, who is one of the original 
authors, whether he was still interested in the library and interested in 
merging the improvements upstream. I can try to help in this process, but I 
don't know if I'm any help.


Name: qextserialport
Website: http://code.google.com/p/qextserialport/
Location: src/core/gps/qextserialport

Comment:

From what I saw on their tracker, they seem to have lots of users, but don't 
really respond to tickets. Thus there are a lot of open bug reports. Not even 
the license is completely clear, see 
http://code.google.com/p/qextserialport/issues/detail?id=8
There also were requests for a fork.


Name: qtermwidget
Website: http://qtermwidget.sourceforge.net/
Location: src/plugins/grass/qtermwidget

Comment:

No commits for more than 2 years. Something might be going on here: 
http://gitorious.org/qtermwidget


Name: nmealib
Website: http://nmea.sourceforge.net/ 
Location: src/core/gps

Comment:

There is a fork with new releases: 
https://github.com/fhuberts/nmealib/downloads


One thing I'm not particularly fond of, is Pyspatialite. Pyspatialite is a 
fork of PySqlite instead of an extension. I don't know though, if QGIS relies 
on it.

To proceed, I ask you to review my patch and please comment on the invidual 
libs, if there is more to know or I stated wrong.

Volker Fröhlich