[QGIS-Developer] Time for db manager to become an "opt-in" plugin?

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi list,

I wanted to raise the discussion around potentially demoting the DB Manager
plugin to become an opt-in, not installed by default plugin available from
the QGIS plugin repository only.

It's likely no surprise to anyone on this list, but there's been a
multi-year effort (mostly thanks to Alessandro!) to move all the important
functionality of db manager over to the QGIS browser. This was driven by a
number of factors:

- It was confusing and messy to expose database management tools through
two completely separate parts of the QGIS interface
- The DB Manager tools are written in provider-specific ways, and don't use
generic QGIS database/provider API calls. As a result there's a lot of
duplicate code there, and db manager doesn't gain the benefits of new data
provider features. (E.g. only a subset of the databases supported by QGIS
and the browser management tools are available for management in db manager)
- The DB Manager functionality wasn't available for other parts of
QGIS/plugins/scripts/etc to reuse, whereas the browser functionality is all
nicely exposed to PyQGIS and is used by other parts of QGIS, eg. processing
tools.
- The Python code implementing db manager is fragile, and is subject to
semi-frequent regressions/breakage (through no fault of the authors -- it's
just the nature of complex python applications which aren't soaked in unit
tests)

I'd say we've reached a stage where the browser now offers all the common
functionality also available in db manager, and we can start to seriously
discuss the future of the plugin.

My personal view is that we should demote the plugin to a
community-maintained, non-officially supported plugin available only
through the QGIS plugin repositories, and remove it from the default QGIS
install.

Thoughts/discussion welcome :)

Nyall
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