[QGIS-Developer] Temporal controller issues

Sat Jan 2 12:45:50 PST 2021

> I understand your frustration,

Thank you.

> the usual recommendation is to use the
LTR version (currently 3.10) if you want stability, any other version
(especially master) is risky.

Using a version labelled as "release" shouldn't be risky, though. Calling
it a "release" implies that a level of testing has been done so that users
can trust that no existing functionality that was not changed has been
broken. A release is what you would give out to paying customers if this
were a for-profit company. You'd never give out a release version with a
new feature that broke so many other features to paying customers, would
you? No. You'd call that a "public beta" or "pre-release" or a "release
candidate" that you give them for free to help find those unexpected use
cases. (And I reiterate—long-standing internal tools like selection,
vertex editor, and identify features should not be "unexpected use cases".)

So if 3.16, referred to as a "release", is really a risky public beta that
you cannot trust to be stable, as you imply here that it is, might I
suggest that non-standard and therefore confusing terminology was adopted?

On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 12:48 PM Alessandro Pasotti <apasotti at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 6:34 PM Cory Albrecht <maps at hanfastolfe.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Let's try to stay positive. NTC is still young, and rapidly evolving.
> It is hard to keep up with all (possible) use cases.
> >
> > I didn't say all possible use cases though. Basic tools—like identify,
> select, and the vertex editor—should not break when one adds a new feature
> as they are commonly used tools and easy enough to test during development.
> "Hey, I'm making a new feature that altes what is shown on the map canvas.
> I should do a few tests with common tools that a person uses on the visible
> items on the map canvas."
> >
> > My day job is that of a medical software developer and I have to think
> multiple steps ahead like that when working on a new feature branch or if I
> am reviewing somebody elses new branch before it gets merged with master.
> If I don't, I get poor performance reviews. When I file new bugs almost
> every day that I use QGIS about something else being broken by the NTC, can
> you understand how it looks to me like it was not up to snuff in the
> quality department before merging into master?
>
> Hi Cory,
>
> Unfortunately we are not a company and we don't have "departments" but
> there is an ongoing effort to start a community driven QA team:
> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/180, it
> looks very promising to prevent this kind of issue.
>
> I understand your frustration, the usual recommendation is to use the
> LTR version (currently 3.10) if you want stability, any other version
> (especially master) is risky.
>
> Kind regards.
>
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 6:17 AM Richard Duivenvoorde <rdmailings at duif.net>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 1/2/21 1:17 AM, Cory Albrecht wrote:
> >> > Can somebody help me under the basics of how things work inside QGIS
> starting from when it loads all the features for a layer through the steps,
> and then finally drawing them on the map canvas, specifically with respect
> to the new temporal controller (NTC)?
> >> >
> >> > The issues caused by the NTC have been very frustrating for me as I
> make mostly (historical) timeline maps and I relied heavily on the old
> TimeManager (OTM) plugin by Antia Graser and group. So many tasks are now
> much more laborious or difficult because so many tools are just not
> time-aware.
> >> >
> >> > Was it not possible to add the NTC in such a way that would have
> still let all the other features work as before with the filtered feature
> set before being made time-aware, rather than confusingly operating on the
> unfiltered set? Or perhaps it shouldn't have been turned on until the
> infrastructure was there for the tools to be time-aware right away?
> >> >
> >> > Because I've just submitted yet another bug about the NTC, this time
> for the selection tool <https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/40818>, and
> it has me more than a little annoyed. As a result of this bug I now have an
> unknown number of duplicate objects in multiple layers across multiple
> databases/projects that I unknowingly pasted into them over the past
> several months since the NTC was added to QGIS.
> >> >
> >> > I feel that the NTC was both poorly thought out and badly implemented
> as all these bugs would indicate.
> >>
> >> Hi Cory,
> >>
> >> Let's try to stay positive. NTC is still young, and rapidly evolving.
> It is hard to keep up with all (possible) use cases. In my case it was nice
> that the select tool DID return ALL features (as I needed it to create a
> graph in time of measurements in one point). So I proposed earlier (cannot
> find it now), to make this an option in the select tools: "use/not use Time
> Filter". But this all takes time ;-)
> >>
> >> In the meantime:
> >> - you can maybe use "Delete duplicate geometries" [0] to remove the
> duplicates?
> >> - if really in need of the old TimeManager, you can change the
> metadata.txt so OTM will still work in current master. In this line:
> >> https://github.com/anitagraser/TimeManager/blob/master/metadata.txt#L7
> >> change '3.12' to '3.18'
> >> - if you need MemoryLayers to work (like I did), then you have to add
> another patch. Let me know if you need that.
> >>
> >> In the meantime: everybody involved in TimeBased data: let's discuss
> use-cases and make NTC better... in time...
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Richard Duivenvoorde
> >>
> >> [0]
> https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/133207/removing-overlapping-duplicate-polygons-in-same-layer-using-qgis/133221
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>
> --
> Alessandro Pasotti
> QCooperative:  www.qcooperative.net
> ItOpen:   www.itopen.it
>
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