[QGIS-Developer] Enhancing recommendations text for metadata.txt (Was: QTiles3 with suboptimal name and repo entries)

[Stefan Keller]

Hi,

QTiles was a useful plugin from NextGIS to generate raster tiles from
a QGIS 2 project. In march 2018 an issue was opened to update it to
QGIS 3 [1]. In january 2019 it was forked and - lucky us users -
updated to QGIS 3 by another developer and released in the plugin repo
[2].

This is all fine, except at least following issues:
1. The plugin was renamed from QTiles to QTiles3
2. In metadata.txt of QTiles3 the 3 entries "homepage, tracker,
repository" all are pointing to the original github repo of NextGIS
[3], but the code for QTiles3 is not there. It's IMHO not yet made
publicly available, except by the fact that Python code is always
included in the zip uploaded to the QGIS repo.

Ad 1: I think renaming a plugin just because it's upgraded to QGIS 3
should be discouraged.

Ad 2: To me QGIS maintainers should somehow be able to check in a
computer-supported way, if the plugin code uploaded is identical with
the code repo indicated in metadata.txt.

I'd like to propose to extend chapter "Recommendations" [4] with
following addendums:

* Don't rename the plugin title just because it's upgraded to a newer
version like QGIS 3.

* Check if source code uploaded to the QGIS plugin repo as zip is
identical to "Code repository" indicated in metadata.txt.

In addition I suggested adding "Requirements" as optional
field/entry/line in metadata.txt" in another thread. But as a short
term action (until a "Requirements" field/entry/line is adopted in
metadata.txt) I'd also suggest this text in chapter "Recommendations"
[4]:

* Mention any requirements, dependencies and restrictions in the
description text section (which can be multi-line). Examples of
requirements, dependencies and restrictions are, if the plugin is
running only on selected platforms, requires SW to be installed
separately or some user account, but also if the plugin is spatially
covering just some countries or regions.

What do you think?

:Stefan

[1] https://github.com/nextgis/QTiles/issues/94#issuecomment-478235015
[2] https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/qtiles3/
[3] https://github.com/nextgis/QTiles
[4] https://plugins.qgis.org/publish/