[Qgis-developer] Nightly builds of master branch for Mac

[Larry Shaffer]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 12:22 PM, John C. Tull <jctull at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2012, at 11:14 AM, gene <martin.laloux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks,
>> What is really confounding is that my colleagues on Windows or Linux do not
>> encounter this kind of problem.
>> However, I know many people who work with QGIS on Mac ( Leopard, Snow
>> Leopard and Lion) but I have the impression that we are not taken seriously
>> by the QGIS developers and some plugins developers.

Gene, I understand how the perception of Mac users not being taken
seriously can occur, but let me assure you this is not the case.

Almost all developers, and other folks like packagers, documentation
writers, translators and web developers, involved with the QGIS
project are volunteers. As such, they individually tend not to have
the extensive multi-platform testing resources like a commercial GIS
product company might have. Each volunteer works on their platform of
choice and often tries to test on as many platforms as they can since
QGIS is based on Qt, which runs on many platforms. While I
develop/compile on Mac, like other devs, I rely upon nightly builds
for other platforms and users to test, which I do in over 5 different
virtual machines via Parallels... but it's very time consuming and
costly.

The fact that QGIS works as well as it does and on so many platforms,
and that it can compete with commercial GIS products is a testament to
those who have contributed.

Since most developers for QGIS work on Linux, and some on Windows, I
understand how labor-intensive (and expensive) it can be to maintain
other platforms, especially like Mac OS X, just for testing. It's not
that those developers aren't taking Mac users seriously, there is just
only so many hours in the day one can devote to an open source project
(albeit, Jürgen Fischer seems to work in a different time dimension).
If it wasn't for William's efforts over many years on the Mac side of
things, Mac users, including myself, would have never discovered or
used QGIS, let alone moved on to help with development.

This is how open source works, people taking initiative to solve
problems. With ever more Mac users will come more Mac devs. I think we
are on the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, in this regard. This is
one of the reasons I took the initiative to help with the project. If
you know of anyone else that can help with QGIS on Mac, *please*
encourage them to do so.

Plugin developers have similar concerns, but possibly with even less
time to volunteer to the project and less resources to devote to
multi-platform testing. They develop on their platforms of choice and
of their own accord, and the project, per se, isn't really in a
position to force those developers to ensure their plugins work
perfectly on all platforms.

There is, however, a concerted effort since after QGIS 1.7 to address
some of these issues with plugins, e.g. plugins.qgis.org, more
stringent acceptance guidelines, etc. There has to be a balance
between strictly ensuring compliance with standards and not making it
too much of a pain to submit a plugin to plugins.qgis.org. This why
some plugins are classified as 'experimental'.

Nonetheless, thank you very much for voicing your concern.
Communication is the key to overcoming open source issues, even if
they are merely perceptual in nature.

>> But I can understand, William (an now you) for Mac, how many for Windows and
>> Linux ?
>
> Putting a positive spin on it, there are now twice as many Mac devs regularly involved with the project than in the recent past.

Yeah for spin.  :^)

> Cheers,
> John
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