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

[Nyall Dawson]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2021 at 00:42, Alexandre Neto <senhor.neto at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> No comments?l
>
> I was expecting at least a bit of discussion about this.

Honestly, I see it as a bit of a non-starter. Conda is still stuck to
such an old Qt version that you can't build anything past QGIS 3.18.

To me that's reflective of a larger issue with the ecosystem, not an
isolated example. These mega-packaging-everything projects just seem
to consistently get bogged down by the sheer number of dependent
packages they try to satisfy, resulting in an overall worse experience
all round.

But that's just my 2c ;)

Nyall


>
> :-)
>
> 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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