[QGIS-Developer] Keeping OTB algorithm in qgis processing

[Nyall Dawson]

On 4 February 2018 at 22:27, Rashad Kanavath <mohammedrashadkm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, OTB provider plugin will be able to fetch and install otb binaries. So
> users installing plugin is the extra step needed.
> 1. Install QGIS
> 2. install otb provider plugin
> 3. select/download && install otb package

This sounds great - and all the more reason why (in my opinion)
publishing the provider as a separate plugin is appropriate. A lot of
users will only have to make a couple of clicks and have a fully
functional OTB install and processing provider ready to go.

On the other hand, I don't think this approach is suitable at all for
a core provider. What would you propose to do for Linux users? OTB may
or may not be available in their distro's repos (e.g. it's not
available for Fedora), so how would the plugin install the dependency
in this case? Or what about for Windows users who do not have
administrative rights to install software?

I personally don't think there's any way to guarantee that OTB (or
SAGA for that matter) is available for all QGIS installs, even if we
can manually trigger a download and install via a plugin. And if they
aren't, then we make things harder for our users, QGIS trainers and
support providers -- the feature set of a standard QGIS install will
vary greatly depending on the platform it's installed upon and user's
privileges on that platform.

Nyall