Hi On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Martin Dobias <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi there > > watching the recent developments in the master branch I see various > nice improvements. And they have something in common: they do _not_ > break API compatibility :-) > > I would like to bring up this topic, because we should purge a lot of > cruft and deprecated APIs on the road to 2.0. The reason why I start > this is that I have been closely looking at the merge of threading > branch to master. The changes in that branch are essentially of three > types: > 1. asynchronous map rendering (i.e. ability to browse the map while it > is still being rendered) > 2. thread-safe API for vector access > 3. various speed optimizations > > Asynchronous map rendering is relatively simple to merge and requires > only few API changes. But without new API for access to layers it is > possible to produce crashes (e.g. map is still being rendered when you > decide to start editing or do some analysis). The new API for vector > access (using iterators) will require removal of the old API > (select(), nextFeature()) in order to work well. And that means that > virtually any functionality that uses layers' data has to be updated > to new API. We need to break things in order to make threaded > rendering work. > > The question is how to proceed and how to communicate that to users. > The procedure could look like this: > - set a date when we will start breaking API compatibility > - create a tag in git that would be the last revision of master branch > compatible with 1.x API > - change plugin manager so that it allows only plugins that say qgis > 2.0 is the minimal version for them to run > - change plugin installer so that it works only with new plugin > repository and shows plugins for qgis 2.0 > > Is there anything else we should consider? The point is to make the > transition as smooth as possible for those using qgis-master. > > And what are your opinions when should we start with the breakage... > in a month? in a week? tomorrow? now? :-) >
I think the fact that we are going to break API in 2.0 is well known and discussed often in releases, blogs, qgis hackfests etc. and is a general expectation when performing a major version numbering change. I think your approach is good (tag last api compatibility etc). As far as I am concerned we can go ahead with API breakage today. There are a number of other gut wrenching changes I would like to make for 2.0: - change theme to 'gis' theme by default - get rid of kids theme - rename default theme to 'legacy' - remove all deprecated api calls Many parts of our api have developed inconsistencies and I would like to spend some time putting my 'rpl' binary to good use trying to clean these up before we release. I think we should continue the practice of marking new api additions / changes with a @note added in 2.0 or @note replaces getLayerId in 2.0 etc. as far as possible so that people can adapt to our changes easily. Anyway +1 for API breakage from me - we will continue maintaining 1.7.x for now anyway for those looking for stability. The number of things we can reasonable backport will shrink as we mess with the API but I don't see the impact to be too big. Regards Tim > Martin > _______________________________________________ > Qgis-developer mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer > -- Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release Manager) ============================================== Please do not email me off-list with technical support questions. Using the lists will gain more exposure for your issues and the knowledge surrounding your issue will be shared with all. Visit http://linfiniti.com to find out about: * QGIS programming and support services * Mapserver and PostGIS based hosting plans * FOSS Consulting Services Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net ============================================== _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
