[Qgis-developer] Future of standalone browser?

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi all,

Just wanted to raise the discussion about the future of the standalone
QGIS browser.

The current situation (as I see it)

- Ignoring a tiny change I made a couple of days ago (to make the
preview use a pan tool), the last commit to standalone browser
(besides general api fixes) was... adding a new icon in may 2015.

- The standalone browser is very limited. There's lots of
functionality available in the browser panel in the main app which
isn't available in the standalone browser, like the search filter and
everything in the right click context menus.

- The current state of the standalone browser is "schizophrenic" at
best. It's predominantly a read-only display of data, but with some
extra random functionality in a toolbar (add wms server (what about
wfs/wcs/etc?), create shapefile (what about spatialite/geopackage?),
set layer projection)

- The UI is very unpolished - eg there's a "header" header over the
browser tree (http://mappinggis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/5.png)

I'm guessing, given this, that there's not a lot of demand for the
standalone browser. This may either be due to lack of interest in this
functionality in general, or else just a reflection of the current
limited functionality available in it.

So what should we do with the standalone browser in 3.0 and future? is
there a future here, or should we just drop this functionality and
save ourselves the maintenance burden? And if there IS interest in
keeping the browser around, is anyone able to step up and sponsor some
investment into making browser more useful and polished?

Nyall