[Qgis-developer] (Yet again) SAGA support badly broken in QGIS

[Martin Dobias]

Hi

On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 2:16 PM, Neumann, Andreas <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
>
> If you guys think about integrating SAGA closer into QGIS, could we also fix
> the issue that SAGA is currently limited to reading Shapefiles for vector
> input? Probably a lot of work - but would this be feasible?

After last year's hackfest in Nodebo just out of curiosity I was
looking at the feasibility of replacing SAGA's native shapefile
support by OGR. IMHO it is feasible - not something for a rainy
afternoon, but maybe a project for 2-3 weeks of developer time. All
work with shapefiles is done by API calls to saga core, so it would be
a matter of reimplementing a part of the API. Similarly, raster access
could be adapted to use GDAL. We could even use directly QGIS API for
vector/raster access if we chose even tighter integration.

I think integrating SAGA tightly into QGIS would be very beneficial
for both projects:
- QGIS would finally have a native analysis engine, ending the long
time struggle with changing parameter names, data conversions, CRS
issues, algorithm naming (e.g. raster vs grid), duplication of
algorithms etc.
- SAGA source code would get more eyes of developers (increasing
quality and bringing in new algorithms) and users. SAGA devs could
focus more on algorithms as GUI side would be handled by QGIS.

This would be however best done with consent from SAGA developers, so
we do not end up with two competing projects.

Cheers
Martin