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

[Alessandro Pasotti]

Hi,

Just a quick followup on this: we briefly discussed this topic within the
PSC and the conclusion was that this is not a PSC matter.

Kind regards.



On Wed, Nov 10, 2021 at 12:16 AM Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
QCooperative:  www.qcooperative.net
ItOpen:   www.itopen.it
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