[Qgis-developer] Plugin Dependencies

Alessandro Pasotti apasotti at gmail.com
Mon Oct 26 10:28:07 PDT 2015


2015-10-26 18:16 GMT+01:00 Hugo Mercier <hugo.mercier at oslandia.com>:

> Hi Alessandro,
>
> On 26/10/2015 17:50, Alessandro Pasotti wrote:
>
> > Hello Hugo,
> >
> > IMHO using  setuptools and pip it's a good idea, it does support
> > download and install from several protocols (git included) out of the
> > box, it also support dependencies and keywords licence tags, I'm not
> > sure that it can support custom tags too, but it it's not so important.
> >
> > I guess that most of the times, a plugin would not even need to be
> > hosted by us on plugins.qgis.org <http://plugins.qgis.org> but it could
> > just be a git(hub) URI (with a big red warning to the the users that
> > they are installing software from an external repository  etc. etc.).
>
> Exactly. That are interesting features.
>
> >
> > I'm not sure about the support on other platforms, luckily (for me) I'm
> > deeply ignorant about other OSes but it seems that windows users often
> > have a lot of problems with installing and running python code: would
> > pip/setuptools make things easier for them?
>
> Actually, this is the main concern I have with the current system: most
> of the Windows users get their python environment through the QGIS
> installer or osgeo4w. And if a plugin needs another dependency, it has
> to be installed by other means.
> Pip does exist for Windows and OSX and could act as a package manager
> (where Linux users are usually happy with their distro package manager)
>
> >
> > I don't understand completely what do you mean with the other points
> > (virtualenvs and binary parts) can you elaborate?
>
> These are just ideas for now :) I don't have a strong experience with
> these tools, so it would have to be confirmed.
> But the idea is that if QGIS plugins are built with setuptools / pip,
> then you can setup different virtualenvs with different sets of plugins
> available in them. That may be interesting when dealing with different
> user profiles or during development.
>
> About binary parts: setuptools allows to insert compilation directives
> if a module depends on C(++) parts. I don't know if this feature could
> allow plugins with compiled parts ... the idea would be to include C(++)
> sources with the plugin and have a standard way of compiling it, so that
> it could be compiled by trusted sources on main platforms ... or by the
> user if a standard compilation environment is present.
>


Some random thoughts:

Quite powerful... but ... the current plugin packaging has very limited
requirements: it's just a zipped folder with a couple of mandatory metadata
and a class interface, building a simple plugin is definitely an easy task.

I'm afraid that by using a much more complicate system (such as
setuptools), would solve some problem for the (few) complex plugins and
create a lot of problems and increase the barrier for the vast majority of
simpler plugin authors.

We should take this into account and think carefully.


-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
w3:   www.itopen.it
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