[QGIS-Developer] Broken 'randomness' for new layer styles?

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 03-02-18 05:17, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> Coincidentally, Mathieu and I have been speaking this week about
> approaches to improve the random colors picked for layers. We came up
> with a similar approach:
> 
> - find a palette of ~100 colors which we think look good for layers,
> and remove gross colors from this
> - include this palette as an additional pre-installed color palette
> within the standard QGIS install
> - on startup, pick a random starting color from this list and a random
> direction (forward or backward). When adding layers, grab this color
> for the layer and then jump to the next/previous color in the preset
> palette for the next layer added.
> - (for 3.2 : allow users to pick which palette to use for new layer colors)
> 
> How's this sound? I'd love to address this for 3.0 - our default
> random color selection often picks yuck colors, and I think it'd be
> great if 3.0 "magically" produced nicer looking maps for users without
> any work required by them!

Plan sounds great, but I think we should not try to do this for 3.0.
The old 'random' colors are ok for now, there are really too much issues
in current master to fix, which will affect average users.

Yesterday I hit crashes (#18019), freezes (#18032) and failures to save
as gpkg (#17899). It is better for the project (I think) if we clean up
this kind of user experiences first :-)
I know I started this color discussion, but still...

I encourage everybody on this list to start using 2.99/3.0 and try to
confirm or invalidate issues from the issue list. We really need to test
for usability.

Regards & thanks for all the hard work and great ideas people!!

Richard Duivenvoorde