[QGIS-Developer] Future of OTB provider plugin?

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi list,

I'd like to kick start some discussions about the future of the official
OTB Processing Provider plugin which comes pre-installed with QGIS.

As you may or may not be aware of, the Processing maintainers have been on
a multi-year quest to slim down the core set of out-of-the-box providers.
The biggest consequences of these have been the demotion of the Processing
R Providers and SAGA providers to 3rd party, community maintained plugins.

The main motivations behind this are:

- Making sure that all the out of the box tools "just work" consistently
across different platforms, without requiring users to install additional
software.
- Easing the maintenance burden on the core QGIS team -- by moving these
plugins to community maintained repositories, we lower the barrier of entry
for contributors to these plugins.
- Avoiding issues with "tight coupling" of 3rd party tools to QGIS
versions. This was especially the case with the SAGA provider, where it
proved impossible to keep a stable plugin which worked consistently across
the range of SAGA versions installable on different platforms. (The 3rd
party SAGA NG plugin avoids this by ALWAYS targeting the most recent SAGA
version, and leaving it as the user's responsibility for installing this
version. We didn't have the same flexibility when the SAGA provider was a
core part of QGIS).

I'd like to now focus on the out-of-the-box OTB Processing provider, and
personally I would like to see this one demoted to a community maintained
plugin.

My reasons are:
1. The provider has not seen development efforts outside of "keep this
running only" by the usual QGIS committers. I would hope to see the same
results as we saw with the R and SAGA plugins where moving to community
maintained plugins increases the number of outside contributions.
2. OTB requires a separate installation outside of QGIS, and isn't easily
available on many supported QGIS platforms (eg there's no Fedora package).
 3. The OTB installer does some weird thing in the QGIS ci environment,
which make me nervous:

2023-11-12T12:54:48.9064680Z #26 18.57 warning: working around a Linux
kernel bug by creating a hole of 20480 bytes in
‘./lib/libQt5Core.so.5.10.1’

So... what does everyone else think? Can we safely demote OTB to a 3rd
party plugin and remove it for QGIS 3.36?

Nyall
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