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

[C Hamilton]

I have been following this interesting discussion and thought I would make
a couple of comments. I understand the different views people have. Ideally
it would be nice for all plugins to work on all platforms, but I can see
the benefit from certain plugins accessing external libraries that are not
available on all platforms. I have considered doing this myself in
accessing some of the excellent astronomical packages on Windows, but have
been concerned that I could no post the plugin in the official repo. Yes
you can set up a separate repo, but it makes it very difficult for the
plugin to be found and it would not be worth it to me to put in the effort
to have it not be officially recognized and be discoverable.

I personally think it is important that there be some mechanism for people
to publish plugins that have platform dependencies. Ideally, they would
first try to find alternative solutions before making the decision to link
to platform specific resources, but some very important capabilities will
require this. I wouldn't want to discourage developers by insisting that
all plugins must work on all platforms.

I am not sure that having two separate repositories is the best approach
either. I don't think that a separate repo should be classified as 'dirty',
etc. I would think that this could be addressed by the metadata associated
with the plugin.

Calvin

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 10:36 AM Stefan Steiger <Steiger at cor-management.ch>
wrote:

>
> Is it not possible to create two official repositories ?
> One for "all-platforms", one for "dirty/fishy/phony/dubious/in-progress"
>
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: QGIS-Developer [mailto:qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] Im
> Auftrag von Martin Dobias
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 6. Februar 2019 15:50
> An: Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
> Cc: qgis-dev <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> Betreff: Re: [QGIS-Developer] Windows only version of a QGIS 2.18x plugin
>
> On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 12:04 PM Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 06/02/19 09:42, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
> >
> > > If you prefer to put it in QGIS repo: just add a big note in the
> > > metadata.txt description that this plugin is only usable with vesper
> > > and windows. And maybe do an OS check in the __init__ for illiterate
> > > users ;-)
> >
> > I respectfully disagree with that: at the very core of the QGIS
> > project it stands the idea of letting everybody use the best possible
> > GIS, without discrimination. This kind of approach would in fact
> > favour Windows users.
>
> My preference would be to keep the official QGIS plugin repo more open and
> allow plugins that do not support all QGIS platforms. Often there are
> useful tools that are only available for one platform and plugin author
> does not have power to change that. But we should not make life of users on
> the supported platform more complicated just because other platforms cannot
> be supported.
>
> As it was suggested already, if there would be a larger amount of plugins
> that are not multi-platform, we could have a piece of metadata so that
> users on other platforms could be warned.
>
> For example, Crayfish plugin for QGIS 2.x did not support macOS - it was a
> known limitation and it would be sad if the plugin would be rejected from
> the official QGIS plugin repo just because of that.
>
> Cheers
> Martin
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