[Qgis-psc] [QGIS-Developer] QGIS LTR releases -- is it time to pull the plug?

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Matthias,

On Tue, 16. Nov 2021 at 12:02:36 +0100, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
> I am very much in favor of evaluating what went wrong and drafting possible
> next steps to improve the situation.

Well, from my point of view there were a few updates late in the release that
started it.

OSGeo4W was using SIP 5 what was capabable of building the releases and master
- as long as both were using SIP's old build build system.  But that was
discontinued with SIP 6.

So for distributions that only have SIP 6 QGIS's support of that had to added -
and was (thanks Sandro).   But that broke the master build in OSGeo4W.   To
address that I updated OSGeo4W to SIP 6 - which in turn - but not unexpectedly
- broke the LTR build.

But there was still enough time to work on that before the release.  And I did
so by backporting the QGIS' SIP6 support of 3.22 to 3.16 - which apparently
worked as good as it was in 3.22.  What I didn't know was that it wasn't
working well on 3.22 either.  And it took a week after the release to become
clear.  Still there were only few - if any -windows nightlies right before the
release to test.

In the week before the release there also was another big change in master's
SIP, that wasn't working on (the native MSVC) windows build at all and took
some discussion to resolve and revert.   That took away more preparation time.
But still not enough to make the release impossible.

Meanwhile PROJ 8.2 was released and GDAL 3.4 was in sight.   After the release
I started working on those updates.

When the SIP issues became apparent after the release, I applied the quick fix
(thanks Sandro) to the OSGeo4W qgis packages and quickly made a new MSI of
3.16.12.

After some more discussion we decided to better do a 3.16.13 release.  Not sure
if it also already applied to the 3.16.12-2 MSI, but the 3.16.13 MSI was
already built with PROJ 8.2 although the rest of OSGeo4W was still using 8.1.
Not sure how that happened, but it did.

That is the apparent source of the new issue.   Those issues were resolved last
week in OSGeo4W - by rebuilding their reverse dependencies against PROJ 8.2 and
GDAL 3.4.  The MSI was not yet updated yet - mainly because the next release is
due friday anyway.

There were also issues with polish characters in the MSI, new GRASS packages
(7.8.6) somewhere in between (reintroducing the "untangle grass" issue) and new
GRASS packages in old OSGeo4W with a wrong set of VC libraries (also breaking the
old OSGeo4W LTR builds on release).  On Linux there was an issue with ubuntu
impish having SIP6 only and using a different compression (zstd) in the
packages - one that debian does (not yet?) use - so the build system there had
to be adapted to that.  Some taking several build iterations to unfold.

And there's also a subtle poppler/GDAL issue where some PDFs are not displayed
- which I also tried to figure out.  That's still there - everything will
hopefully solve itself with 3.16.14 (as it should be fine in OSGeo4W already).

So all in all many more unfortunate events than usual.



Jürgen

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden            https://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                 IRC: jef on Libera|OFTC
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