[QGIS-Developer] Thoughts on QGIS Development and LTR Releases

[C Hamilton]

I first want to say how much I appreciate all of the QGIS developers and
all of your hard work, but I would also like to suggest that you exercise
caution when you label a release LTR. I work in a large organization where
most geospatial analysts can have access to ArcGIS if they want it. The
advantage to ArcGIS is that everyone has been trained to use it, ESRI has
been around for a long time and there is a lot of documentation, training
and support for it. So why would users want to use QGIS?

There are always a curious few who see QGIS and realize they can download
it for free at home. They tinker with it and come to like it and then they
try it in the workplace. For the users who have ArcGIS at their disposal
there must be a good reason to use QGIS instead. These tend to be the
reasons they use QGIS: 1) It does not crash as much as ArcGIS. 2) It is
faster than ArcGIS. 3) It can effectively processing larger data sets than
ArcGIS. 4) There may be some workflow in QGIS that is simpler than in
ArcGIS.

I think that the QGIS community can be proud about the fact that most of my
users who start using QGIS love it and don't want to go back to ArcGIS if
at all possible.

If a user finds that their reason for using QGIS goes away, they will be
disappointed, but will to go back to ArcGIS. I am an advocate for QGIS in
our work place. I think it should be used more, but it is really, really
hard to convince most people. Most of my users are not programmers so if
something is broken they don' t know how to fix it. We have QGIS support
contracts which help. Users consider the QGIS LTR to be a stable release.
If you release the LTR before it is stable, then that can have bad
consequences to our user base.

QGIS 3.10.2 probably should not have been labeled LTR, but I have been
actively telling our workforce not to use 3.10 yet. 3.10.2 still seems to
have some serious bugs as it is frequently crashing (negating one of the
reasons for using QGIS). There must be a WMTS problem that is causing it to
crash and I have had a report that there is a serious memory bug. I am
hoping that 3.10.3 will have solved most of these problems, but I am not
going to count on it until I test it. Everyone has different uses for QGIS
and different workflows and each person's experiences are going to be
different, but I would suggest that you don't mark a release LTR until it
is reliable. Additionally, I suggest that you never back port major
libraries or capabilities into the LTR like what happened last fall. Only
fix the bugs. As saying goes, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." I still
have users on QGIS 2.x and they love it and it works for their needs.

I share this with you in the hope that it is helpful.

The best to you all,

Calvin
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