[QGIS-Developer] What to do with QgsTransectSample for 3.0?

Nyall Dawson nyall.dawson at gmail.com
Sat Aug 26 06:15:52 PDT 2017


Hi all,

I've just been doing some cleanups on the analysis lib - see
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/5078, and I'm now wondering what we
should do with the QgsTransectSample class.

Earlier in the cycle Alex and Victor did a bunch of work exposing a
lot of the analysis lib functionality via processing. But this class
is not used anywhere - it's not utilised by the master c++ code, and
is not exposed via processing either. So we're carrying it around only
for potential use by 3rd party plugins/scripts.

BUT:
- it's unmaintained, and has had no work done (beside compilation
fixes) in the recent past
- it's outdated, and has a bunch of antique assumptions (like always
writing to shapefile outputs)
- there's 0 unit tests
- there's almost no documentation on exactly WHAT this class does, and
how it should be correctly used. And without use in the master
codebase to model from, I can't see how a 3rd party can be expected to
utilise this code correctly anyway.

Options I see are:
1. remove it and avoid the issues
2. get someone who knows how transect sampling SHOULD work to look
over the current logic, take up maintenance, add unit tests, and
expose this functionality via processing
3. leave it in it's current form with unknown quality and unexposed
functionality

Thoughts? I personally see 3 as not an option, and while 2 would be
nice, I honestly can't see anyone picking this up.

Nyall


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