[Qgis-developer] Future of standalone browser?

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Nyall

we (Radim and me) have added it long time ago within a small contract where
people wanted a simple standalone app for preview of data files (with an
assortment of other functionality that was not yet available in qgis app at
the time). Personally I have never been too attached to the idea of a
standalone browser, but thats how they wanted it.

Nowadays, the browser dock integrated inside qgis has richer functionality
and in general much more potential, so I think it would be fine to get rid
of the standalone browser - obviously it is barely used and not really
developed by anyone...

Cheers
Martin


On 20 Feb 2017 06:33, "Nyall Dawson" <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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