[Qgis-psc] Fwd: [qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals] Support SAP HANA databases in QGIS (#151)

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi all,
I'd like to finalize the reply ASAP. Please send comments to the following.
Cheers.
---

Dear xxxx

We wanted to reach out to you regarding your proposed patch for QGIS to
add support for Hana. As you have probably realised, there have been
some concerns raised about the integration of this code. We don’t
believe these are insurmountable but we would like to ask you if you
could respond on a few points as outlined below.

* Testing platform: Currently it is difficult for us to test the work
you have done since we do not have a test / sandbox instance of the
provider that we can use to try it out. Could we ask you to provide us
with a perpetually available Hana database instance that we can use to
test your provider both now and in the future? It would be ideal if you
could set up and maintain this instance for us and simply supply the
connection details since we do not have the time or expertise to manage
this from within the community. We also ask that you waive any licensing
fees for this test platform so that it is freely available to the
project. The testing platform needs to be accessible via our CI
infrastructure, and you should include unit tests implementing the
provider conformance suite which run on our CI.
* Community participation: We would like to ask if you can send one or
more of your developer team members to attend our regular QGIS
Contributor Meetings (next one planned for spring 2020 in The
Netherlands) - details will be added to our wiki soon:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/wiki. We ask this because we would a) like
you to be familiar with the norms and expectations of the QGIS Community
and b) so that we can get to know your team members and gain a sense of
confidence that you are committed to the ongoing maintenance of the Hana
provider and related impacted code in QGIS.
* Packaging and Integration Effort: We would like to ask you if you can
give us some indication of the packaging overhead expected for shipping
your provider in our standard QGIS packages that we distribute for
macOS, Windows and Linux. Have you been able to test on all of these
platforms and is the provider fully self-contained? Or does it depend on
additional libraries that need to be installed on the host operating
system? If so are all of the aforementioned operating systems supported?
Also, note that providers are shipped on mobile implementations of QGIS
(QField and INPUT) and we would like to know that these platforms will
also support your Hana provider. Finally with regard to packaging, if
there is additional overhead for packaging we would like to ask you to
support the QGIS project, either financially or by providing developer
time, to ensure that everything is cleanly packaged for all supported
platforms.
* Point of contact: We would like to ask you to provide a single point
of contact who will be technically knowledgeable and responsive to
requests such as bug reports or questions from our community concerning
your provider implementation.
* Upcoming API changes: For QGIS 3.10 we are planning to integrate a new
abstraction layer for provider connection management. We would like to
ask you to work with Alessandro Pasotti to get the Hana provider in line
with the other providers. This may involve subcontracting him directly
if the process requires more time than he is willing to donate.

Lastly, we would like to say big “thank you” for choosing QGIS as a
platform for your Hana provider implementation - we do appreciate that
having it in QGIS and the new opportunities that it will open for our
users in enterprise environments. We hope you enjoy working with the
QGIS Community and we look forward to having a long and fruitful
association together! We would also like to invite you to consider
financially supporting the QGIS project through our sustaining
membership programme
(https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/sustaining_members/sustaining_members.html#qgis-sustaining-memberships)
- as you probably realised from this email and the discussions
surrounding your pull request, there is a lot of community / volunteer
effort that goes into maintaining and managing the QGIS project and
financial support allows us to offload the maintenance burden introduced
by adding new provider such as the Hana driver to ad hoc contractors or
paid community members.

Best regards

The QGIS Community
-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/