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

[Nyall Dawson]

On Mon, 2 Mar 2020 at 05:03, Micha Silver <tsvibar at gmail.com> wrote:
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> This discussion has raised important issues and clarified concerns from the user's perspective. But there is another hurdle that lies between developers and users that hasn't been mentioned yet (not in this thread, anyway): packaging.
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> Different packagers (on different repositories) release versions on different schedule that may or may not be synchronized with the developers. What makes the situation even more troublesome is release of dependencies at yet another schedule. So all too often we find ourselves stuck after a routine system update, with unresolved dependencies and partially or totally unusable software. This has happened with QGIS and the grass plugin, and recently with updates to proj4 and gdal.
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> There's no doubt that moving to a 2 year life cycle for LTS will help mitigate this recurring problem.

Actually, a 2 year cycle will make this far, far more problematic.

An example is the proj library. QGIS 3.4 was developed using the older
proj v4 library, and while it's possible to build it using proj v 6 or
v7, it's not far from recommended. When proj v8 is released then it
will become completely impossible to build QGIS 3.4. If we tried to
squeeze another 12 months out of QGIS 3.4 then we'll bump into all
sorts of linux packaging issues as the underlying linux distros
upgrade to proj v6 or later. And that's completely out of our
control...

Nyall