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

Sat Feb 29 10:55:37 PST 2020

Hi all,

Thank you for bringing up this topic.

For me the release schedule and the different abbreviations are not very helpful when choosing a qgis version to install. I am not a software developer and thus have little understanding what the different releases are all about.

Clarity, however, is always appreciated, and that is the main thing missing in this topic:

Chris is talking about 3.10.2 having been labeled LTR

Qgis.org right now (29th of February) is mentioning 3.10.3 as LTR

The release schedule on qgis.org is mentioning 3.10.3 as LR with 3.4.13 being the most recent LTR

So things are unclear. Qgis.org itself seems to be unclear which version actually is the LTR.

The information on the Road Map page (schedule release) is also unclear:

“The schedule is aligned to produce roughly the same dates for each year given our four monthly releases with LTRs in late february.”

Looking at the schedule, LTR’s are being released in October, not February.

In this mail Régis says:

“LTR does not mean stable. LTR means it will gain bugfixes longer than releases.”

What does this actually mean? Does this mean 3.4.13 will have releases like 3.4.13-1 and -2 etc.? I do actually find them in the download section ‘older releases’ or ‘previous releases’ (also no idea why there are two different download sections).

I do not find any information on the release schedule page about LTR’s having different bugfix releases. The Road Map page only says: ´ Every third release (starting with 2.8) is a long-term-release (LTR) that is maintained until the next long-term-release occurs. To me, ‘maintained’ can mean a lot of things.

Considering LTR and PR:

What exactly is the difference between 3.4.13 and 3.4.14? Does 3.4.14 contain the same bugfixes as 3.4.13-3? The most recent release date of 3.4.14 is 2019-dec-07 and for 3.4.13-3 is 2019-dec-05.

Or does 3.4.14 only contain new features, compared to the original 3.4.13, released in October?

Additional information on how to ‘read’ the release schedule would be much appreciated. I find the current information difficult to understand and it seems to me it is written too much from a developers or IT-minded perspective in stead od a general user perspective.

Best regards,

Jeroen Hovens

Van: Qgis-user <qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> Namens Régis Haubourg
Verzonden: donderdag 20 februari 2020 18:25
Aan: C Hamilton <adenaculture at gmail.com>
CC: qgis-user <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org>; qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Onderwerp: Re: [Qgis-user] Thoughts on QGIS Development and LTR Releases

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 <mailto: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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