[QGIS-Developer] network analyst in qgis

[Greg Troxel]

Nils Nolde <nilsnolde at gmail.com> writes:

That all sounds like great progress.

Speaking as a packager for systems that are somewhat unusual:

> 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 do not understand how depending on Free Software projects maintained
by others leads to "binary dependencies".  Can these really not be built
from source?  Do you just mean "on the system that uses the plugin, a
bunch of other packages (and presumably their python bindings?) must be
installed?  Is this just about making a self-contained plugin for
Windows where expecting qgis users to manage other code is wishful
thinking?

> 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.

And 'per platform' is going to support only a handful of platforms,
compared to all the places where one can build qgis.

> 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)?

Is the consent about license, about trusting the code with one's data
(since it runs in user context), about the space, or something else?

It could be that I'm asking questions about the broader plugin
architecture and portability, more than your situation.

Greg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20210916/e2675f7d/attachment.sig>