Dear Community,

2020, as we all know, has been an unusual year. In addition to all the other issues we have all faced, we also had to cancel our beloved hackfests. Since we first started holding bi-annual hackfests in 2009, this will be the first year without an in-person event where our friendly community can meet. 

That can’t be! We are a modern and thriving community based on exchange, discussion and collaboration and should foster this even when physical meetings are not possible.

I’m super excited to announce that after some very motivating discussions on the HackFest telegram channel and in the PSC, starting from next week on every last Friday of each month we will hold an informal online virtual meeting to hack around, document, discuss and in general meet the awesome QGIS community. 

There will normally be no formal agenda, no fixed schedule nor moderators, simply join the QHackFriday (pronounced KwakFriday) jitsi room and say hi! 

I added a page to the wiki, so if you have topics that you like to discuss/present you can put them there and others might join you. 

Stay safe and see you next Friday!

We are extremely pleased to announce the winning proposals for our 2020 QGIS.ORG grant programme. Funding for the programme was sourced by you, our project donors and sponsors! Note: For more context surrounding our grant programme, please see: QGIS Grants #5: Call for Grant Proposals 2020.

The QGIS.ORG Grant Programme aims to support work from our community that would typically not be funded by client/contractor agreements. This means that we did not accept proposals for the development of new features. Instead proposals focus on infrastructure improvements and polishing of existing features.

Two proposals focusing on documentation improvements were funded directly from the documentation budget. The remaining 10 proposals continued on to the voting.

Voting to select the successful projects was carried out by our QGIS Voting Members. Each voting member was allowed to select up to 6 proposals. The full list of votes are available here (on the first sheet). The following sheets contain the calculations used to determine the winner (for full transparency). The table below summarizes the voting tallies for the proposals:

Thanks to the generous support by our sponsors and donors, we are happy that all proposals will receive funding, even if QEP#124 had to be reduced in scope (core part only, no GUI: €2,600 from QGIS grants & €1,400 sponsored by OPENGIS).

A couple of extra notes about the voting process:

• Voting was carried out based on the technical merits of the proposals and the competency of the applicants to execute on these proposals.
• No restrictions were in place in terms of how many proposals could be submitted per person / organization, or how many proposals could be awarded to each proposing person / organization.
• Voting was ‘blind’ (voters could not see the existing votes that had been placed).

We received 34 votes from 21 community representatives and 13 user group representatives.

On behalf of the QGIS.ORG project, I would like to thank everyone who submitted proposals for this call!

We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 3.14 ‘Pi’!

Installers for all supported operating systems are already out. QGIS 3.14 comes with tons of new features, as you can see in our visual changelog.

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become a sustaining member, please visit our page for sustaining members for details. Your support helps us fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 3.12 ‘București’! Bucharest was the location of our developer meeting at FOSS4G 2019.

Installers for all supported operating systems are already out. QGIS 3.12 comes with tons of new features, as you can see in our visual changelog.

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become a sustaining member, please visit our page for sustaining members for details. Your support helps us fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

As you may have noticed, the next release version will be 3.14 and therefore, we will call it ‘Pi’.

Usually our versions are named for community meeting locations and the splash screen shows a map related to this location.

For 3.14 we were looking for creative maps that capture the essence of Pi.

Submissions

The submission phase was open for two weeks and we received numerous inspiring submissions:

Public voting

From these submissions, a short list of top 3 candidates was compiled and put up for the public vote:

Candidate #1 Ezequiel Orquera writes about his submission: “As an agronomist, Pi is used every single time that you need to develop a pivot irrigation system (those nice circles we can see on sat. images), making most use of Pi number and the radius. In this image, we can see the circles in contrast with rectangles shapes. The interest thing is that on most of the circles you can see the irrigation system arm that is coming from the center of each circle, making it the radius. Furthermore we all know that Pi x r^2 = circle area. This is useful to estimate for example, crop yields.”

Candidate #2 Francis Josef Gasgonia writes about his submission: “This map would not be complete without the use of Pi. Multicentric ring buffers represent potential danger zones in this map of Mt. Isarog in the Philippines. The calculations necessary to develop the ring buffers depend on Pi. Mt. Isarog is classified as a potentially active stratovolcano. This map best represents the use of Pi in a map because these buffers are crucial in disaster planning, especially now in a Covid-19 pandemic world; wherein ring buffers, and other types of buffers are in use for humanitarian and logistics planning.”

Candidate #3 Michel Stuyts writes about his submission: “Since Pi is very much linked to circles, I looked for the most circular place I could find. The place I made a map of is Vahanga, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. I decorated the map with angles of a circle in radians as divisions of Pi. Because QGIS splash screens usually show a map of a location where a developer meeting was, the chance it would ever have a map of this part of the world is just as irrational as Pi, because the closest inhabited place is more than a 1000km away. My map is also linked to Corona (the reason there was no dev meeting in the first place), because the atoll is crown shaped and Corona means crown. Besides being linked to Pi and Corona, my map is also very much linked to QGIS, because it’s 100% made with QGIS. The angles in radians where made with “geometry generators” from the central point. The fills where made using “random marker fills” combined with an expression using “randf()” to set the size of the markers with a “Data defined override”. For the shallow water on the inside of the atoll I used a “Shapeburst fill”.“

And the winner is …

In the public vote, Francis Josef Gasgonia’s map received the most votes (46%):

Congratulations Francis and thank you again to everyone who participated in this fun contest to ensure that QGIS 3.14 Pi will have great visuals!

Based on text and information from Paul Blottiere and Alessandro Pasotti (both QCooperative)

QGIS Server implements a number of OGC services, such as WMS, WFS, WCS or WMTS and extends these services where useful. Thanks to the efforts of a number of QGIS Server developers and companies, QGIS 3.10 (and 3.4 before) had been certified by the OGC for the WMS 1.3.0 service, and is also a WMS reference implementation.

Last year in 2019, a new protocol has been developed and named OGC API Features (commonly known as WFS3). With the purpose of having an up-to-date QGIS Server, both OSGeo and QGIS.ORG have dedicated funds to work on the implementation of this brand-new service: but we wanted to do it right, so the ambition was also to reach the OGC certification!

This new protocol with REST interfaces gets rid of the XML specification to use the OpenAPI standard as well as the JSON open format instead. In other words, it’s not just another protocol to support, but a whole package of changes and fresh mechanisms to work on. It was quite a challenge!

QGIS core developers of QCooperative were remotely participating in OGC sprints to closely monitor the development of the new OGC API Features protocol. Hence, we started its implementation and a fully operational version landed in QGIS Server 3.10.

Implementation and features

As a reminder, the WFS protocol allows to query, retrieve and manipulate vector features, unlike the WMS format which provides raster outputs. OGC API Features is the natural continuity and consistently provides basic mechanisms to retrieve features and corresponding information in a specific area (the famous GetFeatureInfo request in WFS 1.X).

In addition, QGIS Server also provides transactions for the OGC API Features protocol. This means basically that we can update, insert or delete features in the underlying data. And of course, everything can be easily reached and configured through QGIS Desktop.

Yet another interesting thing to note is also the full support of the date and time filtering. Nifty!

And last, but not least, QGIS Server 3.10 provides a default HTML template with an embedded map to explore the data served by the server. There’s literally nothing to configure, it’s just there as soon as you work with the OGC API Features protocol :).

OGC Certification

Once the implementation was completed, we started to address the OGC certification goal. To avoid unwanted regressions along the way, we first added nightly tests by updating the dedicated QGIS repository for OGC tests. From that moment, HTML reports are available day-to-day to monitor development over time.

Then, some bugfixes and backports later, we’re finally there: OGC tests are green on the development version, 3.12 and 3.10 releases. Yippee!

Conclusion

Now that everything is in order, the last step is to start the formal OGC certification process. From now on, the dedicated QGIS OGC Team takes care of further operations.

Dear community,

First of all, I would like to thank Paolo for his work during the last two years as Chair and for the years before that, and years to come in his role as PSC member. I’m looking forward to keeping up the good work with him.

Secondly, I would like to thank all the community voting members for all the great inputs during the discussion phase of the AGM and for the fantastic participation in the voting process where we had more than an 80% turnout.

It is a pleasure to see that besides approving the more formal points (annual report, financial report, budget and auditors), the AGM approved all matters arising:

• We now have two new honourable voting members: Harrissou Sant-anna and Nyall Dawson. Honourable members are specially designated voting members, whose position does not need to be affiliated with a country user group. Congratulations, and thank you, you are both such an inspiring example to our community!
• Many QGIS users and contributors are geoscientists or geoinformatics specialists. As such, we need to act responsibly and serve as role models. Thanks to the approval of our new environmental policy, QGIS.ORG and the QGIS community committed ourselves to act responsibly regarding our actions and activities where it has any relevant influence on the environment. This will mainly affect our server infrastructure and our physical contributor meetings. The complete policy can be found in appendix 1 of our AGM minutes or on our website.

Beyond thanking Paolo as outgoing chair, I’d especially like to thank Tim, Andreas, Anita and Jürgen for the great work they are doing in the PSC and in general the incredible drive they have in helping to make QGIS thrive. I’m sure that with the help of our new Vice-Chair Alessandro Pasotti we’ll be able to take QGIS to even greater heights. Welcome, Alessandro!

Last, but definitely not least, I’d like to thank every single member of this amazing community for all your help documenting, coding, translating, testing, designing, teaching, supporting and in general spreading the QGIS love.

I never thought, when I first started using QGIS 0.6 in 2005 that 15 years later I would be given the honour of becoming the official face of such an amazing heart.

Have a great week, rock on QGIS!

Marco Bernasocchi

Incoming Chair of the QGIS.ORG Board

For Reference, here an extract of my published vision for QGIS.org:

I want to help QGIS and it’s community thrive under the value proposition of:

Making the most amazing opensource GIS that provides users with value and that meets their needs by providing great functionality and usability, being cost-effective whilst being actively supported by a vibrant and knowledgeable community.

Sharing our work under an open-source license is part of the approach by which we achieve that value proposition as it allows broad collaboration with our developers and users community.

I see FOSS as a very socially responsible way to develop software, but even more, I see the immense technological advantage that writing open-source code brings. This is why I want our focus to be on allowing both pragmatic and ideological views to respectfully coexist and enrich each other.

One of my main motivations to be part of the PSC and to make myself available as project Chair is to help QGIS keep this incredible growth rate by being even more attractive to new community members, sponsors and large/corporate users. To achieve this, the key is maintaining the right balance between sustainable processes (that guarantee the great quality QGIS has been known for) and an interesting and motivating grassroots project to ensure that QGIS remains an attractive project for volunteers to contribute to and help QGIS and its community to grow to become even more the reference [Open Source] GIS project.

Dear QGIS Community

We recently held our 2020 QGIS Annual General Meeting. The minutes of this meeting are available for all to view.

I would like to welcome our new QGIS Board Chair: Marco Bernasocchi and our new QGIS Board Vice-Chair and QGIS PSC Member, Alessandro Pasotti. In case you are not familiar with Marco and Alessandro, you can find short introductions to them below. I will continue to serve on the PSC and am pleased also to say that the project governance is in good hands with Jürgen Fischer, Andreas Neumann and Anita Graser kindly making themselves available to serve on the PSC for another two years. It is also great to know that our project founder, Gary Sherman, as well as long-term PSC member Tim Sutton continue to serve on the PSC as honorary PSC members. They both set the standard for our great project culture and it is great to have his continued presence.

QGIS has been growing from strength to strength, backed by a really amazing community of kind and collaborative users, developers, contributors and funders. I am looking forward to seeing how it continues to grow and flourish and I am excited and confident it will do so with Marco acting as the project chair and representative. Rock on QGIS!

Marco Bernasocchi (http://berna.io @mbernasocchi)

I am an open source advocate, consultant, teacher and developer. My background is in geography with a specialization in geographic information science. I live in Switzerland in a small Romansh speaking mountain village where I love scrambling around the mountains to enjoy the feeling of freedom it gives me. I’m a very communicative person, I fluently speak Italian, German, French English and Spanish and love travelling.

I work as director of OPENGIS.ch which I founded in 2011. Since 2015 I share the company ownership with Matthias Kuhn. At OPENGIS.ch LLC we (6 superstar devs and myself) develop, train and consult our client on any aspect related to QGIS.

My first QGIS (to be correct for that time QuantumGIS) ever was “Simon (0.6)” during my BSc when the University of Zurich was teaching us proprietary products and I started looking around for Open Source alternatives. In 2008, when starting my MSc, I made the definitive switch to ubuntu and I started working more and more with QGIS Metis (0.11) and ended developing some plugins and part of Globe as my Masters thesis. Since three years the University of Zurich invites me to hold two seminars on Entrepreneurship and Open Source. In November 2011 I attended my first Hackfest in Zürich where I started porting all QGIS dependencies and developing QGIS for Android under a Google Summer of Code. A couple of years and a lot of work later QField was born. Since then I’ve always tried to attend at least to one Hackfest per year to be able to feel first hand the strong bonds within our very welcoming community. In 2013 i was lucky enough to have a release named after a suggestion I saved you all from having QGIS 2.0 – Hönggerberg and giving you instead QGIS 2.0 – Dufour. In 2018 I’ve been honored to be nominated Co-chair of the QGIS PSC, since then I’ve been taking care of GitHub, the user groups, running votes, elections, doing some small work on the website, giving more talks on opensource advocacy and foremost helping in the day to day work needed to help our amazing project keep on growing.

Beside my long story with QGIS as user and passionate advocate I have a long story as QGIS service provider where we are fully committed to its stability, feature richness and sustainable development. For that in 2019 we started our own QGIS sustainability initiative financed through our support contracts.

Alessandro Pasotti (@elpaso https://www.itopen.it, https://www.qcooperative.net)

I am an open source software developer and I live in Italy. By education I’m an agronomist with some topography and pedology background, but I turned to the dark side early in my career and I started programming any kind of device that has a chip inside as soon as their price dropped low enough. I started using Linux in 1994 and after some real work as an R&D data analyst for a big pharmaceutical company I started my own small business that was making map-based web applications for the touristic market (there was no Google Map and such at that time) and it is for this reason that I discovered GRASS, Mapserver, PostGIS and finally QGIS when I needed a GIS viewer.

Over the years I’ve made minor contributions to several open source projects and I created a bunch of QGIS Python plugins, but it is from the QGIS Lisbon Hack-Fest in 2011 that I really got involved within the community and my first big contribution was a new website for the fast growing set of QGIS Python plugins (the one that it is already in production today at https://plugins.qgis.org ).

8 years ago I re-started to write some C++ code and I’m now a QGIS core developer and a proud member of this amazing community.

Regards

Paolo Cavallini (outgoing Chair)

Dear QGIS Community,

Our previous rounds of grant proposals have always been a great success (2019, 2018, 2017, 2016). We are very pleased to announce that this year’s round of grants is now available. The call is open to anybody who wants to make a funded contribution to QGIS, subject to the call conditions outlined in the application form.

The deadline for this round is 24th May 2020.

For more details, please read the introduction provided in the application form.

We look forward to seeing all your great ideas for improving QGIS!

We are happy to announce that the PyQGIS Cookbook has received a complete overhaul and is now better than ever.

The PyQGIS Cookbook is a great source of information, not only for PyQGIS beginners or plugin developers, but also for C++ developers: it contains a lot of information about the internals of the QGIS API that you cannot really find anywhere else.

The main point addressed in this review were:

1. All the code snippets have been reviewed and put under automated test in CI. Before this revision, there were 62 tests. Now there are over 300 tested snippets.
2. A few snippets had to be updated because of changes in the QGIS API or because of the deprecation of methods (CRS handling in particular due to the proj6 switch).
3. Textual descriptions have been edited to update the contents where the API has substantially changed.
4. The material covering Python for QGIS Server has been reorganized and now includes new snippets and introductory texts about the new modules and OGC APIs architecture.

For the full summary, please refer to Alessandro Pasotti’s report on the PSC mailing list.

Thank you to Alessandro Pasotti for taking on this project and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!

Back in 2018, we asked QGIS users how often they use QGIS and how often they upgrade. Today, we want to find out more about how different user groups and organisations use QGIS and particularly the LTR. You may be aware of ongoing discussions concerning potentially extending the LTR period and other potential steps to further improve user experience.

Dear QGIS Community:

Due to the uncertainty caused by rapidly unfolding global events related to the COVID-19 virus, we have decided to cancel all in-person QGIS events until further notice. This includes the 25th QGIS Contributor meeting and User Conference that was scheduled to be held this year in Nødebo, Denmark. In the interim, we will pursue ways to meet virtually from time to time, and of course, continue working using our normal collaboration process via email and GitHub.

Thank you for your understanding,

The QGIS Team

With the QGIS Grant Programme 2019, we were able to support six proposals that were aimed to improve the QGIS project, including software, infrastructure, and documentation. These are the reports on the work that has been done within the individual projects:

1. Profile and optimise the QGIS vector rendering code (Nyall Dawson)
   We conducted in-depth research into code “hot spots” and inefficiencies in the QGIS rendering code using a number of code profiling tools. This work resulted in many optimisations in the vector rendering code and other parts of QGIS (such as certain Processing algorithms). These optimisations were made available in the QGIS 3.10.0 release.
2. “Rebalance” the labeling engine and fix poor automatic label placement choices (Nyall Dawson)
   We first designed unit tests covering a range of different label placement situations and then used these tests as a guide to re-work the label placement engine. Now, labels will never be placed over features from a layer with a higher obstacle weight, avoiding the complexities and bugs which were present in the older approach. To avoid disrupting existing projects, the new labeling logic is only used for newly created projects in QGIS 3.12 and later. (Existing projects can be upgraded via the project’s label settings dialog.)
3. Reuse core functionality to provide DB manager features (Alessandro Pasotti & Nyall Dawson)
   We have developed a new QGIS core API, fully exposed to Python, that makes it possible to manage stored connections to various data provider source in a unified and consistent way. This is part of a larger effort building a new connections API.
4. Snapping cache improvements (Hugo Mercier)
   Snapping is crucial for editing geospatial features. Snapping correctly supposes QGIS have in memory an indexed cache of the geometries to snap to. And maintainting this cache when data is modified, sometimes by another user or database logic, can be a real challenge. This it exactly what this work adresses. This feature has been merged into QGIS 3.12.
5. Fix problems in larger 3D scenes (Martin Dobias)
   We worked on two issues within 3D map views. The first one was that map tiles were only being prepared using a single CPU core – this is now fixed and we may use multiple CPUs to load tiles of 3D scenes faster. The other (and greater) problem was that data from vector layers (when they have 3D renderer assigned) were all being prepared at once for the whole layer in the main thread. That resulted in possibly long freeze of the whole user interface while data were being loaded. This is now resolved as well and data from vector layers are being loaded in smaller tiles in background threads (and using multiple CPU cores). As a result, the overall user experience is now much smoother.
6. Open documentation issues for pull requests (Matthias Kuhn and Denis Rouzaud)
   A documentation bot is now alive and automatically create an issue in the documentation repo for merged PR.

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this round of grants a great success and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!

QGIS users who have adopted the 3.10 version when initially released at the end of October 2019 have likely noticed a sharp drop in reliability. The underlying issues have now been addressed in 3.10.2, all users are advised to update *now*.

When QGIS 3.10 was first released in the end of October 2019, a pair of libraries – namely GDAL and PROJ – were updated to their next-generation versions. The advantages are plenty: GeoPDF export[1] support, more accurate coordinate transformation, etc. For those interested, more technical information on this is available here[2].

The update of these crucial libraries led to a number of regressions. While we expected some issues to arise, the seriousness of the disruption caught us off guard. Yet, it was also somewhat inevitable: QGIS is the first large GIS project to expose these next-generation libraries to the masses. The large number of QGIS users across the globe were essentially stress testing both new code within QGIS as well as the libraries themselves.

Thanks to dedicated users taking time to file in report and the community helping out as well as our project sponsors for allowing us to fund development time, developers have been able to fix all known regressions in both in QGIS as well as underlying GDAL and PROJ libraries, benefiting a large number of open source projects.

As a result of this collective effort by the community, QGIS 3.10.2 is now back to being the reliable and stable GIS software we all love. As such, we cannot stress enough the importance of updating now.

Once again, thanks to our community of testers, sponsors, and developers for their countless hours and efforts in making QGIS better.

Happy mapping!

[1] https://north-road.com/2019/09/03/qgis-3-10-loves-geopdf/
[2] https://gdalbarn.com/

With the QGIS Grant Programme 2018, we were able to support seven proposals that were aimed to improve the QGIS project, including software, infrastructure, and documentation. These are the reports on the work that has been done within the individual projects:

1. Increased stability for Processing GUI and External Providers (Nyall Dawson)
   Many bugs in 3rd party providers have been fixed and lots of new unit tests added. The GUI includes new C++ classes and a  new framework that landed in QGIS 3.4. For more details see Nyall’s report on the mailing list.
2. OSGeo4W updates (Jürgen Fischer)
   The updates performed in this project were essential to bring QGIS 3.x to Windows.
3. Resurrect Processing “R” Provider (Nyall Dawson)
   The R provider has been implemented as a provider plugin. The plugin’s beta phase was first announced in Nov 2018 and the plugin is now available for general use.
4. OpenCL support for processing core algs (Alessandro Pasotti)
   The following processing algorithms have been ported: slope, aspect, hillshade, and ruggedness. Even if was not in scope for this QEP, the hillshade renderer has also been optimized. For more details see qgis/QGIS#7451.
5. QGIS server OGC compliant and certified for WFS (Régis Haubourg)
   This project fixed numerous issues to get closer to the goal of getting QGIS Server WFS certified. However, the project ran out of resources before the goal could be achieved. For details see the current WFS tests status page.
6. Charts and drawings on attribute forms (Matthias Kuhn)
   For details read “The new QML widgets in QGIS” and see qgis/QGIS#7801.
7. Update of QGIS Training Manual (Matteo Ghetta)
   This project hasn’t been completed yet.

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this round of grants a great success and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!

The new OGC API for Features (OAPIF) (also formerly known as WFS3) is one of the first protocols of the new generation of OGC web services and we are happy to announce that QGIS Server is ready to serve data following the specifications of this new protocol.

A lot of work has been going on during last summer to make sure QGIS Server was ready to support the new family of REST APIs, the underlying architecture allows in fact to expand QGIS Server API capabilities with any kind of new API that will be available in the future.

The new API is very similar to the well known WFS, but it also comes with a distinct set of features like content negotiations, REST actions, HTML templates, JSON as a first class citizen, self-documentation of the API (following OpenAPI specifications) and a preliminary implementation (the specifications are not yet finalized) of the simple transactions.

The new API is already in the QGIS Server documentation, it only misses the transaction part because the specifications are not yet final and we don’t want people start relying on an API that is probably going to change quite soon.

The vast majority of this new development has been possible thanks to the volunteer work of our core developers but we also wish to thank OSGeo and QGIS sustaining members and donors for funding a substantial part of the following activities:

Text provided by Alessandro Pasotti (QGIS core developer)

We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 3.10 ‘A Coruña’! A Coruña was the location of our developer meeting and user conference in March 2019.

Installers for all supported operating systems are already out. QGIS 3.10 comes with tons of new features, as you can see in our visual changelog.

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become a sustaining member, please visit our page for sustaining members for details. Your support helps us fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

Last month’s user question focused on QGIS documentation. More specifically, we asked how you learn how to use QGIS. And many of you answered our call. Indeed we collected 824 responses over a period of two weeks:

The answers to the first question show that the top three first sources of information on how to use QGIS features or solve problems are: 1. search engines, 2. Stack Exchange, and 3. the QGIS User Manual:

The answers to the second question show that most respondents look for information around 2-3 times a week:

The third question asked specifically about the official QGIS documentation and answers revealed that most users sometimes or often find answers there:

Overall respondents use the official documentation rather rarely:

Finally, there was an open ended question:

You can download the full responses if you’re interested in the details.

The results and lessons we can learn from the responses are currently being discussed on the community mailing list.

After the summer break, we’re back with a new user question.

This month, we want to focus on documentation. Specifically, we’d like to know how you learn how to use QGIS.

The survey is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Ukrainian, and Indonesian. If you want to help us translate user questions into more languages, please get in touch on the community mailing list!

We now have signed packages for macOS. You can find these packages published on the official QGIS download page at http://download.qgis.org.

Rationale

In addition to being a very powerful and user-friendly open source GIS application, QGIS can be installed on different operating systems: MS Windows, macOS, various flavours of Linux and FreeBSD. 

Volunteers help with generating the installers for those platforms. The work is highly valuable and the scale of effort put into packaging over the years is often underappreciated. QGIS has also grown significantly over the years and so has its complexity to package relevant libraries and 3rd party tools to the end-users.

QGIS has been packaged on OSX/macOS for many years, making it one of the few GIS applications you can use on this platform. This is largely thanks to the tireless work of William Kyngesburye (https://www.kyngchaos.com/software/qgis/) who has shouldered the task of compiling QGIS and its dependencies and offering them as disk images on the official QGIS website. The packages for each new release are available within days for all supported macOS versions.

Unlike most other operating systems, macOS can only be run on Apple hardware. This is a barrier for developers on other platforms who wish to compile and test their code on macOS. For other platforms, QGIS developers have automated packaging, not only for the major releases but also for daily code snapshots (aka nightly or master builds). Availability of the daily packages has allowed testers to identify platform-specific issues, well before the official release.

Apple also has a system of software signing so that users can verify if the packages are securely generated and signed by the developers. Up until now, signed macOS packages were not available, resulting in users who are installing QGIS needing to go into their security preferences and manually allow the QGIS application to be run. 

A new approach

In October 2018, Lutra Consulting started their work on packaging QGIS for macOS. The work has been based on OSGeo tap on Homebrew. Homebrew is a ‘bleeding edge’ package manager similar to those provided by Gentoo or Arch Linux. The packages by Lutra bundle the various libraries and resources on which QGIS depends into a single QGIS.app application bundle.  The packages were made available in late 2018 for QGIS official releases and master. QGIS Mac users have eagerly tested and reported various issues and the majority of them were resolved in early 2019.

Following the successful launch of the prototype packages and in discussion with other developers, it was agreed to transfer the ownership of the packaging infrastructure and scripts (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager) to QGIS.org. Using the new infrastructure and OSGeo Apple developers certificate, all QGIS ‘disk images’ (installers) have been available since late May 2019.

What are the main difference between the new installers and the ones offered by Kyngchaos? The new installer offers:

• 3 clicks to install: download, accept Terms & Conditionss, drop to /Application
• All dependencies (Python, GDAL, etc)  are bundled within the disk image
• Signed by OSGeo Apple certificate
• Availability of nightly builds (master)
• Scripts for bundling and packaging are available on a public repository
• Possibility of installing multiple versions (e.g. 3.4 LTR, 3.8 and master) side-by-side

There are some known issues:

• Lack of support for macOS versions earlier than 10.13 (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager/issues/6)
• Issues with some GRASS modules relient on Python 2.x

For a full list, see: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager

Further work

We hope that by providing the new installers, macOS users will have a better experience in installing and using QGIS. Ideally, with the availability of nightly builds and being more accessible to new users, more software bugs and issues will be reported and this will help to improve QGIS overall.

Maintaining and supporting macOS costs more compared with other platforms. As QGIS is one of the only viable GIS applications for macOS users in an enterprise environment, we encourage you and your organisation to become a sustaining member to help assure the continued availability and improvement of the macOS packages in the long term.

Future plans

In future we plan to migrate the packaging process to use Anaconda QGIS packages as the source for package binaries. We also would like to integrate macOS builds into the Travis-CI automated testing that happens whenever a new GitHub pull request is submitted so that we can validate that the macOS packages do not get any regressions when new features are introduced.

Conclusion

With this work, we now have nightly builds of the upcoming release (‘master’) branch available for all to use on macOS. We now have signed packages and we have an automated build infrastructure that will help to ensure that macOS users always have ready access to new versions of QGIS as they become available. You can find these packages published on the official QGIS download page at http://download.qgis.org. A huge thanks to the team at Lutra Consulting for taking this much-needed work, and to William Kyngesburye for the many years that he has contributed towards the macOS/OSX QGIS packaging effort!