[QGIS-Developer] Offering QGIS installers through Windows store

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

I've said it a few times, but I'll repeat myself one more time as it 
can't hurt :-) I'd strongly advise for QGIS Windows installer to rely on 
the massive Conda-Forge packaging effort. OSGeo4W is a bit of a 
masochist effort when one sees that it packages everything from scratch, 
a bit like if QGIS would take the responsibility of creating a Linux 
distro from scratch, whereas leveraging Conda-Forge would enable QGIS to 
benefit from > 90% of its dependencies already packages by a much bigger 
community. The QGIS community could then concentrate on the QGIS build 
recipee, and probably a few other packages specific to QGIS. Then the 
QGIS installer itself would mostly bundle a subset of Conda-Forge 
dependencies pinned at the wished versions.

Even

Le 16/12/2022 à 16:59, Julien Moura via QGIS-Developer a écrit :
> Hello,
>
> I'm working on the packaging purpose at Oslandia.
>
> Because we are committed to pushing QGIS in the most industrial 
> information systems, at Oslandia we have been very interested in QGIS 
> deployment for a few years now.
>
> We have reused and actively contributed to many projects: OSGeo4W v1 
> mirror, NSIS and PowerShell recipes, presentations at FOSS4Gs (or at 
> QGIS conferences), etc.
>
> Since this year, we are making efforts to de-correlate software 
> deployment and end-user configurations (profiles): the QGIS Deployment 
> Toolbelt (https://guts.github.io/qgis-deployment-cli/) has been 
> created with this goal. It is still a young project and also it is one 
> project among many others.
>
> We are obviously very interested in this project of packaging QGIS on 
> Windows Store, a topic that we already discussed internally last year 
> and that I discussed namely with Régis Haubourg in Florence. We 
> obviously have some question marks and discussion points to make sure 
> that all the process is in line with community and open-source 
> governance. Still, it will be quite a challenge and we think it is a 
> good direction to follow.
>
> As noted by others, this seems a huge undertaking though, and 
> uncertainty paves the road and make this goal a distant future.
>
> We could start with gathering and referencing all resources dedicated 
> to packaging, which would sum up as a website ( packaging.qgis.org ?) 
> with all documentation regarding OSGeo4W recipes ( beyond the aging 
> OSGeo trac ), and other packaging methods, like customized .deb 
> packaging.
>
> The goal is to structure and promote knowledge on this topic to 
> attract packager in addition to developers.
>
> And then we would also create packaging process documentation for 
> Windows Store.
>
> Regards,
> Julien M
>
> Le 23/11/2022 à 10:41, Even Rouault via QGIS-Developer a écrit :
>>>
>>> - There is a requirement for every library in the package to be "UWP 
>>> compatible".
>>>   At that time, libpq (postgresql) didn't have that, so I stopped. 
>>> It's hard to say how many other packages will also need special 
>>> attention. [1]
>>
>> Interesting. I know that people have contributed in the past fixes to 
>> make PROJ *compilable* with UWP, but as we don't have a CI target for 
>> that, it is unknown how it behaves at runtime.
>>
>> GDAL likely fails to build with UWP according to 
>> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/1201
>>
>> Without a CI target that can be hooked into github action (maybe that 
>> exists. didn't check), UWP compatibility on the long term is going to 
>> be hard to achieve.
>>
>
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