[QGIS-Developer] Leveraging Conda-Forge to create QGIS installers ?

[Alexandre Neto]

No comments?l

I was expecting at least a bit of discussion about this.

:-)

Alexandre Neto

A sábado, 6/11/2021, 20:46, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com>
escreveu:

> Hi,
>
> Probably a topic that can raise passions and on which I'm moderately
> legitimate to speak, but shouldn't we seriously consider leveraging the
> Conda / Conda-Forge (https://conda-forge.org/) ecosystem for QGIS
> packaging, especially on the Windows and Mac platforms ? QGIS depends on
> a lot of external dependencies, and building them and updating them is
> really about maintaining a packaging system, and QGIS has two such
> separate and bespoke systems for Windows (OSGeo4W) and Mac
> (QGIS-Mac-Packager).  The ideal vision would be that the QGIS project
> mostly maintains the bits specific to QGIS, but not be the sole
> maintainer of its dependencies such as QT, GDAL (and its many
> dependencies), PDAL, GRASS etc, as it is today. Conda-Forge provides a
> truly collaborative environment and active community that already
> bundles a number of those dependencies, and QGIS is already there (not
> full capabilities yet, due to some dependencies missing. That would be
> one of the points to address). The Conda-Forge community is really
> vibrant (if you look at
> https://github.com/conda-forge/staged-recipes/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed,
>
> you can see that 20 packages were added in the last 24 hours!). It is
> also a NumFocus sponsored project. It has support from a number of
> institutions. It is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
>
> There would certainly work needed to build installers from them. I found
> https://github.com/conda/constructor project where you can build
> standalone installers from Conda packages, but was told it is perhaps
> not super mature.  Even if QGIS needs require a dedicated installer with
> custom bits, leveraging already packaged dependencies would probably be
> a big enough win compared to the current situation where the whole stack
> needs to be built and rebuilt from scratch by only a few knowledgeable
> people, on non-shared infrastructure.
>
> There would be the possibility to pin dependencies at certain known good
> points, for example to base LTR builds on top of them.
>
> I guess also that Conda based installers could help for plugins that
> require installing native or Python dependencies, but that'd be already
> more a secondary advantage.
>
> Another proof that Conda is to be taken seriously:
> https://developers.arcgis.com/python/guide/understanding-conda/
>
> I'm not saying this is a magical solution: there would clearly be a
> significant amount of work and technical hurdles to solve to reach the
> same degree of maturity as our current installers, but it is probably an
> investment worth considering for the long term.
>
> Even
>
> --
> http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
>
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