[QGIS-Developer] QGIS 4.0 - let's start some early discussions!

[C Hamilton]

Let me share my experience with the jump from QGIS 2 to QGIS 3. I have been
trying to get QGIS used by the US Government and make it an option rather
than just relying on ESRI. This has been very difficult but I was making
progress. I had offices that were primarily using QGIS and who were
developing scripts to handle their work flow. When QGIS 3 came out they got
so frustrated with the lack of documentation and the complete break of the
API, with no program that would take their scripts and make them QGIS 3
compatible, that they completely abandoned QGIS and went back to ESRI.
Despite the fact that I love QGIS 3 and think it is better than QGIS 2, I
find there is now less interest in using QGIS. I have less customers then I
used to have and it will probably take at least another year or two to get
back to where I was at.

I know that as developers we want to continue to improve the code, add new
features, and have a fun time. Fun tends not to be associated with
documentation. I cannot tell you how important the documentation and
training materials are. I would prefer seeing less new features but make
sure the documentation is excellent and up-to-date. The PyQGIS
documentation really needs a lot of work. It is not sufficient to let the
functions and variable names explain what they do. Each variable needs to
explained in such a way that the programmer will understand what effect it
will have when they change the values. This is one thing that ESRI has done
well - provide tons of documentation and training.

I hope these observations will be helpful to you as you plan QGIS 4. I
don't want to go through what I have been going through with QGIS 3.

Cheers,

Calvin

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 11:33 AM Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> On 25/06/19 13:46, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
>
> > And with a good communication about a "gentle" break I'm confident that
> > we'll have it easier this time.
>
> agreed fully, good communication on these matters is of crucial
> importance to let people accept new versions at move at the appropriate
> time, to minimize noise.
> Given the wide variety of networks, it will be difficult to properly
> spread the tight word. Maybe we should have *official announcements* in
> these occasions.
> Also, I think the already proposed dynamic qgis access page could help a
> lot here.
> Cheers.
> --
> Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
> QGIS.ORG Chair:
> http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/
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