[Qgis-developer] [HackFest] Synthesis of fTools discussion

[Yves Jacolin]

Hello,

We had a discussion about the futur of ftools plugins here at Essen. This 
email aims to sum up the discussion to get more feedback.

# Some Context

Camptocamp wants to contribute to the ftools plugin for one of our customer. 
We have some issues on this plugin on which we want to work on with the 
community.

The community (Victor and Alexander mostly I guess, may be other dev) worked 
to port ftools feature into processing. 

We have now two parts of code to maintain.

# Issues

* Interface improvement
* performance issue
* missing feature in processing algorithme
* translatable algorithme

# Interface improvement

Tim worked on this for the inasafe project in order to improve ui in 
processing. There are also some possibilities to create custom interface for 
each algorithm.

# Performance issue

The Python code could be improved to get better performance. Some other 
possibilities could be to port the code to C library or to use GEOS library 
(Martin tested this with some good performance improvement).

# Missing features

This is not a technology problem, just need some love from someone. As soon as 
all feature from ftools will be in processing plugin we can think about the 
futur of ftools: do we need to completly remove it or to plug-in ftools 
features to processing one, or other? Though?

# Translation

Thanks to Alexander, the processing plugin is now translatable, just need some 
love from our translator community after updating transifex.

I hope my synthesis is not wrong or misleading, please correct me in this 
case. All comments are welcome.

Y.