[Qgis-user] Shared/common library for PyQGIS scripts

[Charles Dixon-Paver]

Personally I feel like this outlines a greater problem of snippet sharing
in many developer communities and is not a problem that is well suited to
the resource sharing plugin, or even a single traditional GitHub repo.

My personal approach was to set up a subdirectory on GitHub with code
snippets and add a pyqgis subdirectory (although I don't have a useful
collection of things yet). I don't really like gists for something I want
to maintain or have discoverable, so I use this dedicated repo instead. I
would suggest if you plan on creating a number of different snippets that
you create a similar one, or if you want to collaborate or make an
occasional contribution then suggest an alternative.

>From my experience with the community it seems like a lot of the most
useful snippets are scattered throughout conversations on the mailing
lists, or within stack overflow. When working with the Esri platform and
Web App Builder, there were a couple of repositories with custom widgets
etc but the GeoNet forum was also probably the biggest resource for types
of things like code snippets, although it had similar limitations to what
I've experienced with pyqgis, perhaps with slightly better discoverability
since I only really looked in one place and if I couldn't find something I
didn't waste extra time searching across various platforms.

Personally, I dislike stack overflow for a number of reasons. For one, I've
found it's platform gamification has always led to a weird passive
aggressive attitude from community members. The GIS site seems a lot more
welcoming, but as a general rule, I just straight up don't like the
platform because of this. The amount of unnecessary question reformats and
edits for points is just painful to witness. The system itself has pretty
funky issues as well - like flagging questions as duplicates but not
providing links to those duplicates. Or where the OP directly posts links
to duplicates but explicitly states the solutions don't work, only to have
their question closed anyway... In any event, I think there's a lot of
people like me that only end up there when Google/ DuckDuckGo takes us
there... Which leads to the typical stack overflow issue of all code being
horribly outdated and nothing actually works. Most of the snippets I find
on SO are for QGIS 2 anyway. It's also not pyqgis specific.

The mailing lists themselves I find have poor code discoverability, but I
don't think a forum would resolve this and would likely just fragment the
community further.

For personal use, the best tool I've found for snippet management has been
https://github.com/snibox/snibox but I don't know how well that scales. I
used to use dokuwiki too, but it takes a lot of effort to format stuff and
is more of a publication tool, but I don't see a quality wiki being
maintained without significant effort.

Your question has prompted me to set up a
https://github.com/zacharlie/awesome-pyqgis repository.

This way we can collectively maintain an up to date list of resources for
PyQGIS, including up to date links for documentation, tutorials and
training, and links to people's repositories. If something like this
already exists and my list is redundant, please someone let me know so I
can delete it before we put any significant work into it, and share
something better so that the community knows about it.

I'm open to other suggestions.

Regards


On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 00:38, <qgis-user at stripfamily.net> wrote:

> Is there a place where folks can contribute scripts that others might find
> useful? I know about the Resource Sharing plug-in, which is a way to point
> to a repository one is maintaining. I'm thinking more of a common
> repository where some might contribute the odd script. There's an archived
> git repository in qgis/QGIS-Processing->scripts, but that's no longer
> active.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-user mailing list
> Qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
> List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-user/attachments/20201020/73440c06/attachment.html>