[QGIS-Developer] LTR management [was Re: Delaying 3.10.1?]

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Even,

On Fri, 22. Nov 2019 at 23:20:49 +0100, Even Rouault wrote:
> > QGIS LTR in Windows has also switched from proj 5.x and gdal 2.x to
> > proj 6.x and gdal 3.x which has resulted in some new bugs.
 
> I see 2 different situations:
 
> - 3.10 was intended to work with GDAL 3 & PROJ 6 (work started with 3.8 if I 
> remember). OSGeo4W received a late upgrade to them because GRASS 7.8 wasn't 
> ready yet for them (no offense to the GRASS team !), but devs have been able 
> to work against GDAL 3 & PROJ 6, so that wasn't unknown territory. Probably 
> that 3.10.0 could have been delayed while OSGeo4W hadn't switched to GDAL 3/
> PROJ 6, but it wasn't clear when GRASS would be out.

More background:

* GDAL 3 requires PROJ 6
* QGIS 3.10 has optional features that require GDAL 3,
* GRASS uses OSGeo4W for dependencies on Windows,
* GRASS also contributes the GRASS packages to OSGeo4W,
* GRASS didn't support PROJ 6 & GDAL 3 until quite recently,
* GRASS was therefore blocking the PROJ 6 and GRAL 3 updates in OSGeo4W,
* GRASS' windows builds were not working for quite a while,
* I introduced nightly builds of GDAL 3 and PROJ 6 next to the regular GDAL and
  PROJ packages to OSGeo4W to be able to build the QGIS nightlies against GDAL
  3 - because the main GDAL was blocked and QGIS 3.10 with the optional features
  The release packages were still against GDAL 2.
* The GRASS' builds were only revived after I tried to build myself and
  contributed pull requests to fix their builds (and that still looked quite
  familiar, because it still resembled much what I contributed years ago).
* Those pull requests were also targeting on building GRASS with GDAL 3 and
  PROJ 6 in OSGeo4W and gave an other already pending GRASS pull request (not
  mine) that added GDAL 3 and PROJ 6 support a nudge and it was also merged
  into GRASS 7.8.1.
* When QGIS was released, GRASS was not yet released and there was no clear
  time frame on that.  So in OSGeo4W GDAL was not updated yet and hence QGIS
  was still built GDAL 2 and PROJ 6.
* QGIS 3.4 supports PROJ6 - apparently not many people tried it. The LTR
  nightlies in OSGeo4W were using it and Debian unstable also already provides
  PROJ6.  Not many to test - but also not none.
* People "asked" about the missing GDAL 3 features in QGIS 3.10.
* I prepared testing packages of the upgrades (GDAL 3, PROJ 6, QGIS 3.4 and
  3.10 and more) so that they could be used in the GRASS build, without meanwhile
  breaking the rest.
* Those were taken live along with the GRASS packages once those arrived.

> So overall how the situation was handled doesn't seem that bad for a release
> exercising new major dependencies.

Thank you.

> …

If i had to run this through a committee first, probably nothing of the above
had happend yet and I wouldn't have time left to actually do it.


Jürgen


PS: Windows CI status:
 * appveyor: still times out (after 4 years the limit of 1h still isn't enough)
 * azure pipelines: runs out of disk space (limit 10GB)

PPS: I also need something to punch ;)

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden            https://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode
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