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

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi, 

I think 90% of the devs who stated their opinion in this thread are in
favour of allowing plugins that work only on one single OS. Not because
they like it particularly, but because they want to be pragmatic and
inclusive. I think this is already a clear statement. 

We don't want to encourage single OS plugins. When approving them we can
investigate if they can be made multi-OS with reasonable effort - but we
want to be inclusive. We just have to communicate it clearly that they
only work on OS xy. 

Situation is different with binary stuff in a plugin. Shipping exe files
with a plugin should be clearly forbidden - but if that binary stuff can
be installed separately through a different mechanism, then it should be
fine. 

So if the outcome of this discussion is not clear enough, we can also do
a voting on Loomio. 

Greetings, 

Andreas 

On 2019-02-07 07:21, Tim Sutton wrote:

> 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 [1] 
> 
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> 
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