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

Tue Oct 20 08:37:06 PDT 2020

This is why I mentioned snibox, as it's the best self hosted platform I've
found of the bunch for this sort of thing... They have a demo app:

https://snibox.github.io/docs/demo.html

I'm +1 for Raymond's suggestion on versioning, however I think we need a
decent convention for this that makes it easier for someone from the future
to build an AI-driven collect-and-search-all-the-scripts web scraper and
data discovery platform. That convention probably belongs in the cookbook.

I think if we make a good template for snibox you could achieve quite a lot
(especially if we include some custom maintenance-bot DSL system in the
template comments). Spam and trolling might still be an issue though.

Alternatively dokuwiki, github wiki (or similar) might be suitable... But
even those have steeper learning curves and aren't as usable or
discoverable as a copy-paste scenario.

In any event, the platform may need infrastructure, moderation and
curation, which could be challenging.

My intermediary solution was that each user makes their own (or
collaborative between some users) repo which stores the scripts as files,
then have a central curated list which links to repos with interesting or
useful data. This is a simple solution that scales with little to no
effort. It is much more geared towards curated and maintained collections
though.

Tagging, labelling and discovery of items is still a bit terrible within a
GitHub repo though. At best I could suggest something like the data table I
placed at https://zacharlie.github.io/svg4qgis-registry/ that reads the
meta from an index at
https://github.com/zacharlie/svg4qgis/blob/master/svg-registry.json

I think you could easily extend this with csv tags or something (and dress
it up a whole lot from being a 30-minute patch job). I feel it's a
kind-of-horrible-but-relatively-effective method of metadata management and
data discovery. I just don't think it would scale all that well. But that
could be up to each repo owner to maintain or decide how to implement
discovery (outside of standard GitHub search).

On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 16:23, <qgis-user at stripfamily.net> wrote:

> Thanks for a really thoughtful overview of the issues.
>
> I don't think Stack Overflow or any of the Stack Exchange sites are the
> right way to go. In addition to your gamification objections (to which I
> add the obsessive "that's two questions" objections), it's just not a
> focused place to put snippets (or gists as it's called in other places).
>
> Adding to the cookbook doesn't seem right either, since it makes the
> cookbook too diffuse and fills it with so many examples it becomes
> distracting. Add in the fact that the cookbook examples have to be runnable
> in the test harness and require action on a pull request and the hurdles
> become too high.
>
> My preferred solution would be some sort of lightly moderated snippet/gist
> manager that doesn't require any special privileges beyond perhaps
> registration to provide an impediment to spamming. Github gists don't seem
> to have tags so we'd need to establish some sort of convention for
> embedding "tags" in comments. Perhaps someone who is familiar with online
> gist managers can suggest an approach.
>
>
> On 10/20/2020 1:34 AM, Charles Dixon-Paver wrote:
>
> 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.
>>
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