[Qgis-developer] [QGIS Server] Maintain it and create a team

[René-Luc Dhont]

Hi devs,

The Qt4 and Python 2.7 is going away from QGIS master, following this PR:
Require python 3 and qt5 https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3510

But a part of the project directly suffered of this: QGIS Server. As 
explain on the Pull Request 'Require python 3 and qt5', all the QGIS 
Server tests has been disabled. This means that QGIS Server is not 
maintained with automatic tests for QGIS 3.

So Mathias Khun has opened an issue about QGIS 3 API to remove QGIS 
Server from QGIS master.
https://github.com/qgis/qgis3.0_api/issues/63
The discussion is opened but I don't know if all the developpers are 
aware of this.

For our team, 3Liz (Michaël, David and I), the QGIS Server is a big part 
of the QGIS project and it will really be a pitty if it disappears. A 
part of the QGIS users are interesting in it because they can published 
web services directly from their work. So QGIS Server is a reason for 
them to use QGIS. Many users like the part of using QGIS desktop to 
configure easily many options for publication, and use WMS, WFS, WCS and 
event WPS with different clients (one of them is Lizmap).
We take much time (and about half of it without funds) to keep this 
feature alive and up to date with QGIS improvements, and are willing to 
continue down this path (we believe in it and have many good feedbacks 
from users)

We would like to raise interest around QGIS Server, and report here that 
this part of QGIS is really used in production by companies and research 
centers, and maintained by some devs, and not just a QGIS side project 
"for fun".

We just discussed with Alessandro Pasotti and we would like to create a 
team to maintain and discuss about the evolution of QGIS Server. We 
would like to use this opportunity to improve QGIS Server and make it 
more maintainable and granular.

Some questions to gather reactions :
* Who is interested in maintaining QGIS Server ?
* Who is interested in participating in  QGIS Server (code, ideas, 
review, tests) ?
* Please share any ideas to enhance (refactor) QGIS Server

Regards,
René-Luc D'Hont