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

[Nyall Dawson]

On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 at 02:16, C Hamilton <adenaculture at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Hey Calvin,

This feedback is SO invaluable to the project, thanks for submitting it!

Nyall

** SNARK: for what it's worth, we're not the only ones with crap API
migration docs. I recently had the extreme misfortune of having to
port some javascript from the ESRI ArcGIS JS library v3 to v4. Apart
from a handful of scattered notes, the migration docs are effectively
one paragraph: "Version 4.x is a substantial overhaul of the ArcGIS
API for JavaScript and its mapping components. Consider rewriting
applications instead of simply trying to update them.". In comparison,
the QGIS 3 api break documentation are pure gold.



>
> 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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