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

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 10:13 PM, Charlie Sharpsteen
<chuck at sharpsteen.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 3:32 AM, Tim Sutton <lists at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think the fact that we are going to break API in 2.0 is well known
>> and discussed often in releases, blogs, qgis hackfests etc. and is a
>> general expectation when performing a major version numbering change.
>> I think your approach is good (tag last api compatibility etc). As far
>> as I am concerned we can go ahead with API breakage today. There are a
>> number of other gut wrenching changes I would like to make for 2.0:
>>
>> - change theme to 'gis' theme by default
>> - get rid of kids theme
>> - rename default theme to 'legacy'
>> - remove all deprecated api calls
>>
>> Many parts of our api have developed inconsistencies and I would like
>> to spend some time putting my 'rpl' binary to good use trying to clean
>> these up before we release. I think we should continue the practice of
>> marking new api additions / changes with a @note added in 2.0  or
>> @note replaces getLayerId in 2.0 etc. as far as possible so that
>> people can adapt to our changes easily.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Tim
>
> Since backwards-incompatible changes are being discussed, may I also suggest
> that we update PyQGIS to use version 2 of the SIP apis for QString and
> QVariant?
> The version 2 API is much more Pythonic and has better support for Unicode
> and Python 3. It is also the only version that is compatible with PySide.
> Because of this, many GUI components that use the Enthought scientific
> python modules are only compatible with version 2 of the SIP APIs. Notable
> projects include Matplotlib and IPython.
> More information on why using API v2 is a good idea can be found here:
>   http://www.pyside.org/docs/pseps/psep-0101.html
>
> Updating to the new SIP API should be a simple matter of adding:
>     import sip
>     sip.setapi('QString', 2)
>     sip.setapi('QVariant', 2)
> To the startup routine for the Python kernel before any PyQt libraries are
> added. All Python plugins that use QString or QVariant would have to replace
> these with plain Python strings and dicts.
> Thoughts?
> -Charlie

This is probably something commented on by Martin.

Regards

Tim

-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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