[Qgis-user] GRASS support lost (again) on Ubuntu/Mint

[Andre Joost]

Am 26.09.2017 um 15:30 schrieb Patrick Dunford:

> The issue with support for Xenial is not directly a Qgis responsibility.
> It is relying on (a) the lack of support from the Ubuntu official
> repositories and (b) the lack of timely updating of the third party
> Ubuntugis repository. Neither of those is under the control of Qgis.

For that reason, QGIS has a debian repo that works without any ubuntugis 
stuff. But you will not have GDAL 2.x on Xenial, and only GDAL 2.1 on zesty.

>
>
> The only versions of Qgis that require Ubuntugis are those built for
> Xenial and earlier versions of Ubuntu. It is not required for later
> versions of Ubuntu as the required packages are included in those
> distros standard repositories.

Ubuntugis only supports Ubuntu LTS versions: currently precise, trusty 
and Xenial. They provide up-to-date GDAL and other packages that don't 
get updated on the main Ubuntu repo for variuos reasons. Newer versions 
of Ubuntu have newer versions of GIS packages.

>
>
> So if you have an issue that is caused by Ubuntugis then one possible
> solution is to have a distro that is based with a later version of
> Ubuntu than Xenial. Linux Mint 18.x is based on Xenial. When Mint was
> first launched they used to be up to date with releases based on up to
> date Ubuntus, now they are falling so far behind that the latest Mint,
> 18.x, is based on Xenial.

Linux Mint usually takes every ubuntu LTS version, and applies their 
stuff on that.


> Since Xenial, Ubuntu has released Yakkety,
> Zesty and is about to release Artful.

These are non-LTS, with only half-year support. Linux Mint has released 
18.1 and 18.2 in the meantime, so no "falling behind".

>
>
> I have verified that Qgis 2.18.13 runs without any problems with this
> GRASS plugin on Ubuntu 17.04 and Debian 9.1. None of these require
> Ubuntugis and I have not used it in the list of repositories for
> installing the software from.

But you are at GRASS 7.2.0 and GDAL 2.1.2. These are "falling behind" 
the current sources of those packages. Ubuntugis is designed to offer 
the latest GIS builds for Ubuntu LTS versions.

>
>
> To solve your problem you have basically three choices
>
>
> 1. Install a suitable version of [a]Ubuntu or Debian on your PC
>
>
> 2. Install a desktop hypervisor like VirtualBox and build a virtual
> machine for a suitable version of [a]Ubuntu or Debian to run Qgis in
>
>
> 3. Wait until Ubuntugis works.

Ubuntugis **works**. It has GRASS 7.2.2 since 2017-09-19.

QGIS 2.18.13 was released 2017-09-18, At the time, GDAL 7.2.1 was the 
current GRASS version in the ubuntugis unstable ppa.

At the moment, you can get GRASS 7.2.1 from Ubuntugis **stable**, but 
you need to downgrade GDAL to 2.1.3 too.


>
>
> I don't see particularly a problem with recommending either 1 or 2 as
> options, just because Ubuntu is supporting Xenial as an LTS doesn't mean
> everything available is guaranteed to work on it.

That's the expected behaviour of a LTS.

> The fact you have to
> use ubuntigis is because the standard Ubuntu repositories don't contain
> the required packages. There are other issues with the Xenial packages
> for Qgis, including an older version of Qt on that platform that causes
> rounding issues when displaying floating point numbers.
>
>
> Feel free to contact the developers or report a bug if you are still
> concerned.

Done: https://issues.qgis.org/issues/17202

> You may also wish to contact the ubuntugis maintainers.

No need for that, Ubuntugis packages work at the moment.

Greetings,
André Joost