[Qgis-psc] Fwd: QGIS 4.0 publicly announced - right time for propose and implement breaking changes?

[Régis Haubourg]

Hi Vedran,

thanks for raising this proposals

On 24/04/2025 10:12, Vedran Stojnović via QGIS-PSC wrote:
> Hi PSC,
>
> since I didn't get any response in QGIS Developer mailing list, I am 
> forwarding this to PSC mailing list, I consider this a PSC decision 
> and would love to hear at least some feedback.
>
PSC is not driving features from above, we rely on the contributors and 
help in finding consensus when it doesn't happen by itsel, or help in 
funding un-fundable changes.

If your changes are small features, did you already file a feature 
request in Github and discuss it there ? Good pratice is to open feature 
requests, then trigger discussions in the developper's list for 
implementation help or further discussion.
If you propose a massive change breaking UI, API, user workflows, you 
must write down an enhancement proposal (QEP) in the dedicated 
repository.  Contributors will ask for implementation details, migration 
plans etc.. there.


> [..]
> What I'm thinking of? Few examples:

Let's discuss a closed list of items. Migrating to QGIS4.0 is not the 
moment of breaking all things. This transition is a major change, but 
not a rebuild from the ground up.

> 1) change some default settings for QGIS Desktop
> - e.g. left double click on layer to open attribute table for vector 
> layers instead of opening properties (no other software that I used in 
> my life opens properties on left double click), for raster layers it 
> could do a zoom extents on raster (logic to open image on double click)

This is a legitimate feature request, rather minimal, and that could be 
driven by a setting.  I don't agree that opening the attribute table is 
the only action that makes sense. Inkscape triggers a layer rename (F2) 
for instance. opening the attribute table for massive table is probably 
something you don't want to happen to easily. Not sure you will get a 
consensus for the default action, but having settings for this makes 
sense to me.


>
> 2) change name(s) of some native algorithms - I find some of them 
> confusing
> - e.g. "native:polygonize" uses lines (mathematically defined lines - 
> which only have start pt and end pt) and creates polygons, but we have 
> also "native:linestopolygons" which by description also uses lines and 
> converts them to polygons, but actually expects polylines (polygons 
> drawn as line layer), and then we have gdal:polygonize which converts 
> raster to vector polygons
>

I think that can be done directly in Pull request, as long as we have 
common naming rules. I'm not sure if thess already exists, maybe we 
should write minimal rules first. Could you take this action ?


> 3) remove deprecated functions from expression calculator
>
> 4) change logic in some algorithms/expressions
> - e.g. "point_n" function is 1-indexed instead of 0-indexed 
> (QGIS/issues/29100)

Agreed. (this doesn't mean this will happen, someone has to take the 
cleanup action)


>
> ...
>
> I'm sure that other developers/contributors/users have their own ideas...
>
> So I would love to see something like this as type of process similar 
> to QEP - where a user/contributor could propose a change, and than it 
> can be commented from everyone, but in the end should be voted from 
> core developers or by PSC:
> - does it make sense
> - is it doable or too complicated and so on...
feature requests are the way to go. Let's address things in separate 
issues / threads / pull request.
We are not obliged to push all changes in QGIS4, QGIS has a fast release 
cycle exactly for this.
>
> We're kind of short on time, but I believe that this can be done until 
> October.
Are you saying you have ressources to code things yourself?


All the best

Régis

>
> -- 
> Srdačan pozdrav / Kind regards,
> Vedran Stojnović.
>
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> QGIS-PSC at lists.osgeo.org
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