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

[Tim Sutton]

Hi all

Frankly I am a little surprised at this thread. While I agree that we should encourage the development of cross platform plugins, I don’t ever recall us stating that it is a hard requirement, and it is not listed as such in the plugin requirements page[1]. If it is going to be a requirement, let us make it clear and upfront so that people don’t invest in significant amounts of work only to find their plugin rejected.


@Paolo wrote:

>  I'm now dealing with CUDA, thanks Nyall for letting me know. Please let me know if you know of other plugins in the same situation.

@Paolo: Don’t you think it would be better for us to conclude the debate and have a clear policy before contacting other plugin developers?

I think there are probably numerous plugins which are ’single platform’ plugins - even some from our most valued core developers e.g. crayfish in 2.x did not support macOS[2] - thanks for fixing that in 3.x Lutra!

Even in core QGIS we have platform exclusion stuff - can anyone *actually* get grass algorithms to run on macOS?

And what about plugins that exclude users for other reasons e.g. AustrianElevation only works for people in Austria. Isn’t the whole point of the plugin repo to provide a platform for more niche functionality that might not be applicable to all users, albeit discriminated by operating system, societal domain or geographic region?

As a last note for the original poster: if your windows dependency is a windows executable. I did a quick test and was nominally able to get Vesper to run on macOS under wine so I suspect if you are interacting with it via python process calls you should be able to get your plugin to run easily on macOS and Linux (*cough* GNU Linux, apologies St. Ignutius :-P). That would swiftly resolve your original issue and probably equally swiftly open a whole new debate about the relative merits of a plugins in the the QGIS plugin repo that requires a shareware licensed[3] dependency (gosh do people still use the shareware model, you are taking me back 35 years to my misspent youth!).




[1] https://plugins.qgis.org
[2] https://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/products/crayfish/wiki/
[3] https://sydney.edu.au/agriculture/pal/software/download_vesper.shtml


—








Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

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Skype: timlinux 
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