[Qgis-developer] Feedback re future of core c++ plugins in QGIS 3.0

[Nyall Dawson]

On 8 November 2016 at 11:24, Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Discussion is currently underway concerning the future of a number of
> the plugins which come preinstalled with QGIS.
>
> This concerns the plugins:
>
> - coordinate capture
> - evis
> - geometry_checker
> - georeferencer
> - heatmap
> - interpolation
> - offline editing
> - oracle raster
> - raster terrain analysis
> - road graph
> - spatial query
> - topology checker
>
> If you're an active user of any of these plugins, your feedback would
> be greatly appreciated. You can join the discussion over at:
>
> https://github.com/qgis/qgis3.0_api/issues/67

My original email didn't result in much feedback at all from users.
I've been thinking further about this and I'm now wondering if we
should take a more aggressive stand with these plugins leading into
3.0.

What I'd like to do now is put two of these plugins on "notice".
Specifically evis and oracle raster. No-one seems interested in
actively maintaining or improving them anymore. The only changes
they've seen in recent years are changes required to keep them
compiling. Oracle raster hasn't seen a bug fix since 2010 and no
enhancements since it was introduced in 2009, and evis last had a
specific bug fix in 2011 and last had a performance enhancement in
2009. I think it's safe to say these plugins have been abandoned by
their original authors.

Given this, I think we should remove them from 3.0. First we could put
out a general notice saying they will be removed if no-one steps
forward to maintain (or sponsor) them. And failing a positive result
from that remove them from 3.0.

Nyall



>
> Note that a number of preinstalled plugins have already been removed
> in 3.0 - specifically:
>
> - geometry snapper: was generalised to work with all layer types and
> moved to a processing algorithm
> - zonal statistics: was moved to a processing algorithm
> - dxf2shp converter: was removed from QGIS - this conversion is better
> handled outside of QGIS, eg by using OGR tools directly.
>
> Nyall