[QGIS-Developer] Windows only version of a QGIS 2.18x plugin

[Tom Chadwin]

Matthias Kuhn 🌍 wrote
> If it's a single-purpose use-case specific plugin which is
> intended to be run inside a specific organization / scenario, then I
> don't see the benefit of investing a lot of effort into something that
> will never be used.

By "effort", do you mean the work to make it cross-platform? If so, yes, but
in the case you describe, there is also no argument that the plugin should
go in the official repo.

This is a specific, but not uncommon, case, if I understand correctly. The
QGIS plugin is a kind of middleware between QGIS and another tool which is
not cross-platform. At work we have multiple users with another such plugin.

In these cases, I guess it's a judgement call: are there enough potential
users out there who would benefit from the extra visibility of having this
plugin in the QGIS official repo? Or is the plugin so closely tied to the
third-party application that it is more appropriate that that other app
should host it, either on their own compatible plugin repo, or as a zip
(bearing in mind that installing a plugin from a zip is massively easier
than it used to be)?

At the end of the day, all other factors being taken into account, excluding
a plugin because it only works on Windows runs the risk of the project
appearing to be unfriendly towards Windows. As a Windows user myself, I'm
afraid that attitude is sometimes (often?) apparent among QGIS devs, as it
obviously is in the broader open-source dev community.

Cross-platform is a QGIS killer strength. But let's not make it a dogma.

Thanks (and apologies if this went a tad OT)

Tom



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