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

[Alexandre Neto]

Alessandro,

Thank you for raising the subject.

QGIS on conda is not at is best shape right now, as we are stuck with the
lack of a full featured Qt 5.15. The current package is lacking webengine
that was split. The good news is it's already built on OSX arm64 which may
be useful in the future.

Alexandre Neto

A terça, 4/01/2022, 16:47, Alessandro Pasotti <apasotti at gmail.com> escreveu:

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