[Qgis-developer] Priority of Bug #12057 ?

[Blumentrath, Stefan]

Dear devs,
With QGIS you delivered a really excellent product with tons of useful features and I am very fond of it. I am aware that you get lots of user requests and have to prioritize according to that. Yet, my humble feeling is that there is one topic which did/does not receive the attention it probably deserves.
Proper area and distance calculation is a central functionality of any GIS. It is used by probably 97.5% of the users and should work in any case and without the need for the user to define some (at least for beginners) non-obvious settings, which in addition can get changed back by QGIS without the user`s notice, e.g. when loading data in different CRS (including Open Layers). Unfortunately, this seems to be a long open issue in QGIS (see: https://hub.qgis.org/issues/12057). If I may make one wish for the Hackfest next week, please make Bug #12057 (and related issues) a top priority of the event!
If such basic functionality gives wrong results, personally I would consider it as a risk for the good reputation of the QGIS project. Assume a user delivered project results to a customer, which are based on wrong area calculations (not unlikely that this happens), what do you think he or she feels about QGIS after that... And even if one discovers it beforehand. That does not exactly contribute to the user`s faith in the reliability of QGIS.
I dare say that this series of bugs is so severe, that if it gets fixed (hopefully one and for all), it would provide reason enough to justify a 2.8.3 release (BTW. Thanks for 2.8.2).
Probably also worth writing a test for this bug, given it`s (long) history?

Kind regards,
Stefan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20150511/9eabf900/attachment.html>