[QGIS-Developer] Get rid of Processing scripts in favour of plain alogrithms

[G. Allegri]

I raise this topic with a new thread, because I think it's worth a
dedicated discussion.
Some questions were asked in another thread [1] about the status of
Processing scripts. It was noticed that the scripts are a "chimera", with a
special syntax and not very pythonic. The current implementation accentuate
it, because API refactoring poured necessarely into scripts too...

In short my proposal is to get rid of scripts as we know them, and make
ScriptAlgorithmProvider a simpler option to create GeoProcessingAlgorithms,
without the burden of implementing a brand new GeoAlgorithmProvider and /
or a plugin to ship it.

ScriptAlgorithmProvider could load GeoProcessingAlgorithms from the same
special folder as it is for scripts now, maybe using the features offered
by Python's imp module (e.g. for module reloading while testing in the
script editor).
As suggested by Etienne Trimaille, an alogrithm skeleton could also be
offered to start developing the algorithm, similar to what can be found
here [2].

The gain would a unified way for writing (Python) algorithms, less code
(and bugs) to mantain, and a pure pythonic approach in coding.

What's your opinion?

All the best,
Giovanni

[1]
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2018-January/051511.html
[2]
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/python/plugins/processing/algs/exampleprovider/ExampleAlgorithm.py
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