[QGIS-Developer] QGIS plugin depends on pypi package

[John Lindsay]

Hello Matthias,

This is very interesting and I'll certainly take a closer look at it as an option. Do you know if the plugin is stable yet? I can find it listed in the online QGIS plugin repository, but not yet from the search inside QGIS itself. Thanks.

Regards,

John



Prof. John Lindsay

Dept. of Geography, Environment & Geomatics,

The University of Guelph,

Room 122, Hutt Building,

E-mail: jlindsay at uoguelph.ca

Phone: (519) 824-4120 ext. 56074

Web: https://geg.uoguelph.ca/faculty/lindsay-john

Research page: https://jblindsay.github.io/ghrg/index.html

WhiteboxTools GIS project: https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/whiteboxgeo

________________________________
From: QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> on behalf of Matthias Kuhn via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2024 12:20 PM
To: Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com>
Cc: John Lindsay via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] QGIS plugin depends on pypi package


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Hi John,

A former colleague of mine developed "qpip".
This is meant as a pip dependency manager for plugins and will install any additional dependencies from a supplied requirements.txt in a controlled way into the user profile folder.

There has never been any big announcement done regarding this plugin, but it's the best "pip"-like integration into QGIS which I am aware of.

https://github.com/opengisch/qpip

Kind regards
Matthias

On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 6:13 PM Greg Troxel via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
John Lindsay via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> writes:

> Besides, a better solution would be for the plugin to install this
> package via pip when it is itself first installed and launched. I
> tried to accomplish this with the following code:
>
> https://github.com/jblindsay/whitebox_workflows_for_qgis/blob/4e463262f6cfd1987afa2f3f7e0e79656eb8d27e/whitebox_workflows_for_qgis_provider.py#L56
>
> This code, which runs whenever the plugin is launched, first checks to
> see if whitebox_workflows can be imported and if not, it runs pip from
> the Python script to install it. Unfortunately, some users have
> reported issues with this not working correctly:

(Writing from the UNIX perspective.)

Perhaps biased by my packaing background, I view any code that downloads
other code at runtime (without an explicit user request) as a security
bug.   This is especially true if it isn't getting sources pinned to a
version and validated by checksum.

That said, there's a lot of interesting questions about how to deal with
dependencies of plugins.   For qgis itself, dependencies are properly
dealt with by a packaging system and that seems ok.

For plugins, I could see treating them as python modules and packaging
them, but qgis wants to have its own package management system.

qgis is usually installed, via packaging, globally (/usr or /usr/pkg, or
similar).  The immediate question is where plugins go.  I'd expect them
to be in the user's file area vs system, unless installing them in some
administrator role.  The next question is, if they depend on something,
what prefixes and install methods are expected for those things, both
regular packages (programs and shlibs) and python modules.  Which is
partly/mostly about what the search paths are in the plugin execution
environment.

Overall, I'd rather see plugins fail with a message and leave
installation as a manual decision than have plugins run pip install.
But I get it that most people probably don't see it that way.
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