[Qgis-developer] Breaking API and merge of threading branch

[Martin Dobias]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 12:41 PM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> Il 10/08/2011 12:32, Tim Sutton ha scritto:
>
>> Anyway +1 for API breakage from me - we will continue maintaining
>> 1.7.x for now anyway for those looking for stability. The number of
>> things we can reasonable backport will shrink as we mess with the API
>> but I don't see the impact to be too big.
>
> +1 to break API
> I think:
> - from a power user point of view (and for plugin writers), the largest impact will
> be in loosing (and having to rewrite) a lot of plugins, at least for several weeks or
> months; for this, I think it is very important to move *before breakage* all the
> plugins (if the authors agree) to the new infrastructure, so devs could help each
> other migrating to new API

I do not see a reason for migrating the plugins - this should be a
task of the individual authors. If an author has disappeared but the
plugin is useful, someone will probably start maintaining it and
upload it to the new repository. This is how it works with OSS
everywhere. Let's avoid a massive import of plugins that do not work
correctly due to API changes and without an active maintainer.

> - it would be good to have 1.8 binaries for major distros before the breakage, so
> people willing to use new features *and* existing plugins will be happy.

We did not really plan to make a 1.8 release. I am a bit afraid that
preparing another release might distract us from the road to 2.0.
Anyway this is a question for the release manager.

Martin