[Qgis-user] Thoughts on QGIS Development and LTR Releases

Thu Feb 20 09:24:35 PST 2020

Hi Chris,
I share most of your concerns, as much as I advocate the spread of QGIS in
enterprise and organisations.
It is true we need always more reliability, documentation.  I'd like also
to point that 2.x is not so far away, and that the reliability have since
improved by order of magnitude.
Let's also keep in mind that the level of expectations of users grows very
fast too, so this is a race that will never end ;-)

However, I think there is a cultural problem, and probably a pedagogy
effort we should make.

LTR does not mean stable. LTR means it will gain bugfixes longer than
releases. So it is highly expectable that installing a LTR in its early
versions will let you hit more issues.  I remember the very same situation
for ArcGIS 8 or 9 early stages. And this is the very same for linux
distributions or any software. I don't remember any  early x.0 release in
QGIS that was not followed one week later by an urgent point release. But
new users don't know this. They see a big green button "download that sexy
new version".

That said, how to improve the situation? After years of discussions in the
various events, hackfest, conferences, discussions with public or private
customers, developpers, here are the possible leads we have:

- Keep on explaining the rationale and codes of free software to users and
potential funders.

- Try to keep our "power users / early testers" population, so that we
target the right issues during bugfix sprints.

- Offer longer LTR lifespan, so that funders have a larger window to
actually find and have bug fixed.

- Keep on explaining that QGIS bugfix release should be easily deployable
in big organisations. OSGEO4W silent installs allows this. Maybe going
toward auto upgrade /  patch system could help (it's a big effort though)

- Keep on gaining more budget for QGIS.org, so that we can setup a real
semi automated Q/A acceptance test suite. This requires human tests.
Boundless did, it is possible. It is a matter of ressources. Should it be
centralized or community powered ? I have no idea, but this requires
someone to be hired all year long to do this. IMO, enterprises requiring
such reliability should really consider sponsoring this framework and
dedicate some human ressources.

- Same goes for documentation

- Same goes for code review, we need to have more reviewers. the learning
curve is steep though, and we need to find money for this

- Improve the website with a simple page, with graphics and videos on what
is the lifecycle of QGIS, and what version to use for what expectations.

A note about QGIS.org budget. To me, it is only a leverage, a catalyser,
but it can't fund itself a full QA infrastructure with the current economic
model of the association. I think, this is our responsability to spread
this word everywhere so that the user / contributor rate changes a bit.

After all, even Microsoft with its thousands of testers, and its early
testing network was able to push updates causing the famous Blue Screen Of
the Death.
So shit can happen. Packaging nightmare with major changes in underlying
libraries remains a really really complex process. How fast we are to fix
and change our ways to do is the real question. I think the QGIS and OSGeo
Community does a tremendeous work.

Best regards,
Régis

Le jeu. 20 févr. 2020 à 16:21, C Hamilton <adenaculture at gmail.com> a écrit :

> I first want to say how much I appreciate all of the QGIS developers and
> all of your hard work, but I would also like to suggest that you exercise
> caution when you label a release LTR. I work in a large organization where
> most geospatial analysts can have access to ArcGIS if they want it. The
> advantage to ArcGIS is that everyone has been trained to use it, ESRI has
> been around for a long time and there is a lot of documentation, training
> and support for it. So why would users want to use QGIS?
>
> There are always a curious few who see QGIS and realize they can download
> it for free at home. They tinker with it and come to like it and then they
> try it in the workplace. For the users who have ArcGIS at their disposal
> there must be a good reason to use QGIS instead. These tend to be the
> reasons they use QGIS: 1) It does not crash as much as ArcGIS. 2) It is
> faster than ArcGIS. 3) It can effectively processing larger data sets than
> ArcGIS. 4) There may be some workflow in QGIS that is simpler than in
> ArcGIS.
>
> I think that the QGIS community can be proud about the fact that most of
> my users who start using QGIS love it and don't want to go back to ArcGIS
> if at all possible.
>
> If a user finds that their reason for using QGIS goes away, they will be
> disappointed, but will to go back to ArcGIS. I am an advocate for QGIS in
> our work place. I think it should be used more, but it is really, really
> hard to convince most people. Most of my users are not programmers so if
> something is broken they don' t know how to fix it. We have QGIS support
> contracts which help. Users consider the QGIS LTR to be a stable release.
> If you release the LTR before it is stable, then that can have bad
> consequences to our user base.
>
> QGIS 3.10.2 probably should not have been labeled LTR, but I have been
> actively telling our workforce not to use 3.10 yet. 3.10.2 still seems to
> have some serious bugs as it is frequently crashing (negating one of the
> reasons for using QGIS). There must be a WMTS problem that is causing it to
> crash and I have had a report that there is a serious memory bug. I am
> hoping that 3.10.3 will have solved most of these problems, but I am not
> going to count on it until I test it. Everyone has different uses for QGIS
> and different workflows and each person's experiences are going to be
> different, but I would suggest that you don't mark a release LTR until it
> is reliable. Additionally, I suggest that you never back port major
> libraries or capabilities into the LTR like what happened last fall. Only
> fix the bugs. As saying goes, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." I still
> have users on QGIS 2.x and they love it and it works for their needs.
>
> I share this with you in the hope that it is helpful.
>
> The best to you all,
>
> Calvin
>
>
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