[Qgis-developer] Removal of labeling search methods??

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi all,

Just floating an idea out there... does anyone think there'd be major
objections if I removed all the labeling "search methods" and just
left the default one ("chain") as a hardcoded method?

I'm referring to the choice between Chain/Popmusic tabu/Popmusic
Chain/Popmusic Tabu Chain/FALP which you can get to from the global
label settings. I"m 99.99% sure there's no-one around the QGIS
community who has any idea what all these different methods mean, and
googling for them only leads to the QGIS manual (which just mentions
them, no details) and the original PAL journal article (with scant
detail).

Could we just pick one and remove the rest? My motivation is that
there's a ton of duplicated code here, and if I want to add something
to the label selection routines (namely mutually exclusive labels) I'd
currently have to implement it multiple times in a huge mash of
undocumented, obscure code.

I'd love to kill all this duplicated, unmaintained code and
consolidate it all into a single pathway.

Any ideas/objections/clarifications to this?

Nyall