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

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi Paolo,

It looks very good and covers the most important points, good job.


Just some small remarks:

- I wonder if we could shorten the testing platform to a generic 
requirement like "the provider needs to be integrated into our CI 
infrastructure, and any related maintenance, licensing and hosting costs 
need to be fully covered". I think we don't need to go into technical 
details in this organizational level emails.

- I would not mention "donated time" from any one of us and provide a 
link to https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html , 
that's where any external party can get the best bang for the buck if 
things should get done


Best regards
Matthias

On 9/12/19 10:54 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> 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