[Qgis-developer] fTools and GdalTools: sextante vs original plugins

[Alex Mandel]

On 03/19/2013 11:34 PM, Alexander Bruy wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:40:03 +0100
> Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The port of original algorithms to SEXTANTE seems to be nearly
>> complete  and SEXTANTE has superior approach of creating the GUI for
>> algorithms dynamically (similar to GRASS toolbox) instead of manually
>> creating GUI for each algorithm. So...what about removing the original
>> fTools and GdalTools plugins before 2.0 and focusing on improvements
>> of their counterparts in SEXTANTE?
>
> +1 for removing fTools and GDALTools.
>
> But unfortunately not all fTools and GDAL tools algorithms ported to
> SEXTANTE, some of them still present only in original plugins. I
> plan to work on this.
>
> On Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:42:04 +0100
> Victor Olaya <volayaf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Anyway, I think that redundancy in SEXTANTE is not so bad as having
>> several ways of doing the same thing in the QGIS interface, since
>> users will understand that algorithms come from differnt providers and
>> are not completely identical.
>
> Also note that some users have no SAGA installed but when similar
> algorithm from GDAL (or other more common source) is available they
> still can do their work. So redundancy is not bad.
>

I'd encourage that those tools still be made available via the Vector 
and Raster menus. Also that they should be update-able via the Fetch 
python plugins. Preferably independent of Sextante upgrades, but still 
be the integrated version.

I also would miss the command line viewer that's in GDAL Tools. That is 
extremely useful when prototyping something that I plan to move to a script.

Does sextante allow for batch application the way GDALTools currently does?

So basically, I'm all for streamlining but I don't want to loose 
features and flexibility because of that.

Thanks,
Alex