[Qgis-psc] Draft announcement re 3.0

Sun Feb 7 22:25:41 PST 2016

Hi Tim,

Thank you for the draft!

One issue I have is the term "master branch" - which perhaps could be 
made clearer, less ambiguous.

Is there only one "master branch" at any time or will there be two 
parallel "master branches" - a 2.x one and a 3.x one? Normally, I would 
assume that there can be only one master branch at any given time - e.g. 
2x will stay master branch until 2.16 and then 3.0 would be the master 
branch. Or can there be two parallel master branches?

One statement i don't like is "only for 3.x: not knowing when that will 
ever release or" --> could we rather say "only for 3.x: not knowing when 
this will release or" (take out the word "ever")

I assume that we think that 3.x will happen, but we don't know when. The 
current wording seems to imply that the PSC has doubts if 3.x will ever 
happen - which I don't think is the case. But since this "o-tone 
Jürgen", I don't know if you want to change this ...

Andreas

On 07.02.2016 22:56, Tim Sutton wrote:
> Hi PSC
>
> I have written up a draft announcement about the 3.0 plan. I am 
> including a complete draft below.. Please let me know if you have 
> comments, corrections, additions to this DRAFT so that I can post it 
> and then advertise it more broadly.
>
> COPY BEGINS
> — ——— — ————
>
>
> QGIS 3.0 plans
>
> Ok so quick spoiler here: there is no QGIS 3.0 ready yet, nor will 
> there be a QGIS 3.0 for some time. This article provides a bit more 
> detail on the plans for QGIS 3.0. A few weeks ago I wrote about some 
> of the considerations for the 3.0 release, so you may want to read 
> that first 
> <http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/> before 
> continuing with this article as I do not cover the same ground here.
>
> A *lot* of consideration has gone into deciding what the approach will 
> be for the development of QGIS 3.0. Unfortunately the first PSC 
> vote regarding which proposal to follow was a split 
> <https://www.loomio.org/d/5MCdPwoL/vote-to-approve-the-process-for-qgis-3-0> decision 
> (4 for, 3 against, 1 abstention and 1 suggestion for an alternative in 
> the discussion). During our PSC meeting this week we re-tabled the 
> topic and eventually agreed on Jürgen Fischer's proposal (Jürgen is a 
> QGIS PSC Member and the QGIS Release Manager) by a much more unanimous 
> margin of 8 for, 1 neutral and 1 absent. Jürgen's proposal is largely 
> similar to the Proposal 2 described in my previous posting 
> <http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/>. I 
> want to make some special notes here about our discussion and 
> subsequent decision which will hopefully help to clarify the thinking 
> behind our decision for other interested observers.  First let me lay 
> out Jürgen's plan in his own words:
>
> "My preferred approach would still be:
>
>   * Do a Qt5/PyQt5/Python3 branch in parallel, actually work on it
>     until it's ready, make it master and release it as 3.0
>   * Meantime keep working on master (2.x) and keep releasing them
>     every 4 months as usual
>
> Everyone can work on the branch (s)he wants (or is hired to), but 
> needs to consider if (s)he want to do it (or spend funds on):
>
>   * only for 2.x: knowing that it will be released soon; but might
>     become unusable because platforms drop support for stuff it
>     depends on sooner or later
>   * only for 3.x: not knowing when that will ever release or
>   * for both: knowing that work needs to be done twice.
>   * People adding features to the master branch will be responsible to
>     ensure that their work gets merged to 3.0 branch.
>
> As PSC we should maintain the environment for people to do something 
> for QGIS - but we cannot tell them to - so we don't have resources we 
> can actually plan with and that means we can either release something 
> when the big thing is ready or what we have in fixed intervals." - 
> Jürgen Fischer
>
> What follows are some further details and clarifications to our 
> preferred approach:
>
> *Why do parallel development?*
>
> Parallel development of 3.0 maintaining our master branch with 2.x 
> code in it has advantages and disadvantages. First the advantages:
>
>   * If we encounter major technical difficulties / release blockers in
>     the 3.0 branch, it will not impact on our normal 3 monthly release
>     cycle.
>   * Our binary build systems (Linux, Windows and OSX binaries) will be
>     unaffected until 3.0 is ready.
>   * It is very likely that building 3.0 binaries on different
>     platforms is going to have difficulties for each platform. For
>     example OSGEO4W has no Python3 and Qt5 packages yet. Someone needs
>     to see to the creation of the required package as a separate
>     exercise from the actuals development of a version of QGIS that
>     will take advantage of these updated libraries. We don't yes know
>     what problems may be in countered in preparing these.
>   * "Don't break what already works": we have a working and relatively
>     stable master branch and we don't want to do a 'cowboy stunt' and
>     break it. We prefer to wait until the 3.0 branch is mature, has
>     passing tests and is known to work well before merging it into
>     master and treating it as our 'best we currently have' master branch.
>
> Of course nothing in life is completely easy, there are also some 
> disadvantages*:*
>
>   * Some developers may feel that running two mainstream branches is
>     dilution of effort. To counter this, our public recommendation is
>     that after 2.16 comes out, all QGIS contributors are *strongly
>     encouraged* to provide their patches against the 3.0 branch.
>     Any features applied to the master branch is *not guaranteed* to
>     be part of the 3.0 release.
>   * Regular merging of master to the 3.0 branch may prove more and
>     more difficult over time as the two branches diverge more. Again
>     we will strongly encourage that developers submitting new features
>     after the 2.16 release do so against the 3.0 branch.
>   * 3.0 branch won't have auto build system for nightly binaries in
>     the beginning. Since we expect that the initial branch of 3.0 will
>     break these anyway, Having a separate branch is actually an
>     advantage here as it will give binary packages some time to get
>     their build systems up to speed.
>
>
> *The schedule will not be fixed:*
>
> One thing that we want to make really clear (and was a key point in 
> our many discussions) is that there will be no fixed release date for 
> QGIS version 3.0. There are several reasons for this:
>
>   * As a steering committee, we can only set the QGIS ship pointing in
>     a given direction, our power to actually make work happen is
>     extremely limited. This is because we are a community made up
>     largely of volunteer developers or developers working on a
>     commission basis for third party clients. We have no say in how
>     these contributors spend their time.
>   * We do not yet know which (if any) major technical issues will be
>     encountered during the development of 3.0. Any such issues could
>     very well delay the roll our of QGIS 3.0.
>
> Instead our plan is to make the 2.16 release and then effectively move 
> all developer effort to the 3.0 branch as best we can (through close 
> liaison with our developer community).
>
>
> *Looking forward to 3.0*
>
> Personally I am very much looking forward to the release of QGIS 3.0 - 
> it represents another huge milestone in our project, it affords us a 
> great opportunity to get rid of a lot of cruft out of our code base 
> and API's and it will arm us with a set of modern, new libraries that 
> will see us through the next several years. Rock on QGIS 3.0!
>
>
> timsutton
>
> QGIS PSC Chairman
>
>
> ——————
>
> COPY ENDS
> —
>
>
>
>
> Tim Sutton
>
> Visit http://kartoza.com to find out about open source:
>
> * Desktop GIS programming services
> * Geospatial web development
> * GIS Training
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>
> Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net 
> <http://freenode.net>
> Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee
>
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>
>
>
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