[QGIS-Developer] network analyst in qgis

[Nils Nolde]

Hi devs,

I'd have sort of an early announcement, but also a related question:

we're currently developing a proper network analyst toolkit as a plugin. 
We feel it's another important step to make ArcMap/Pro more redundant 
haha one can dream:)  In any case, the plan is to provide highly 
performant network analysis, such as complex VRP solvers, 
location/allocation, regular routing/isochrones/matrix etc, and all 
LOCAL, no remote API, no HTTP (though optionally we provide HTTP 
capabilities for the routing engines). We really do aim to replace 
ESRI's network analyst in QGIS mid-term, though location/allocation 
features will be fairly slow for now as that is currently implemented in 
python (which we'll release as a PyPI packages as well). If there's 
enough traction we'd contract someone for proper c++ metaheuristic 
solvers, that's above our heads. For everything we need a performant 
routing engine, so we have to include several third-party FOSS projects 
for routing & solving, those dependencies are unfortunately all binary. 
So after the (hopefully encouraging) announcement, my question:

I know it's strongly discouraged to submit binary components to the 
official plugin store. Also that wouldn't make much sense, some of those 
dependencies weigh like 30 MB or more (per platform). Can someone point 
us to a plugin that has a similar logic of pulling binary libs? I'd like 
to avoid to leave it to the user to install those dependencies, rather 
have it done automatically.

Are there other recommendations to handle this situation? I guess at the 
very least the user should agree to download those binaries. Since we 
have to download 4 different libraries, do you think the user should 
consent to each one individually (the routing engines are crucial, but 
location/allocation & VRP not really)?

Really, really excited to see how this turns out!!:) ETA is end of 2021 
(so really early/mid-2022 probably;)).

All the best
Nils