[QGIS-Developer] Development environment setup

[Greg Troxel]

Tom Christian <tom at sparkgeo.com> writes:

> Hi Greg, thanks for your input. Regarding this:
>
>> I find the choices that give rise to this approach to be problematic.
>> Containers are a useful device for someone to choose, but if people feel
>> they have to use a container, that's a clue that the situation is
>> troubled.
>
>> I suspect you are running into packages which require an exact
>> dependency, rather than the proper approach of having a minimal version,
>> trying hard to not to raise that without cause, and adapating to any
>> released version >= the minimum.   Some upstreams, influenced by
>> language-specific packaging tools, take the approach that their package
>> is the most important thing in the world and therefore it's ok to insist
>> on exact versions.
>
>> So far, it seems that qgis does very well on not being unreasonable
>> about dependencies (as long as gcc 12 turns out to be ok; see below).
>
> If the QGIS repo is good at managing its dependencies in a way that
> limits its impact on the rest of my system - that's great. The problem
> is that any other repo could manage its dependencies differently. Over
> the past year I've probably worked across 50 different repos, many of
> which I do not maintain and cannot manage their dependencies. If I
> don't attempt to isolate each project within Conda, containers, or a
> VM then I am at risk of surprise breakages from what should be
> unrelated repos. In any repos that I do maintain I provide a
> containerised option whenever possible to ease the lives of other
> contributors.

I do understand that there's a lot of bad practice out there and that it
needs mitigation at times.

>> However, I think it's important for it to be reasonable to build without
>> containers.
>
> I agree - I'm not suggesting QGIS should _only_ build and run in a
> container, but I think the option of building and running in a
> container could be better supported and I'm happy to contribute to
> that effort if others also want it.

That's fine with me.  I have just been seeing more and more projects
that say

  to install, run docker blah blah

with absolutely zero information about how to deal with it.  I've even
submitted bug reports (*not* qgis) about the build-from-source
instructions being lacking and been asked "why are you as an end user
even trying to build this?" which by traditional Free Software standards
is shocking.

In my view it's a slippery slope towards "container is the approeach"
leading to "we don't have to be reasonable about dependencies bcause we
have a container", and hence all pro-container posts need commenting on
about the dangers of losing general buidlability (not really kidding, a
bit hyperbolic).