Thanks to your donations, we were able to hire core developers to focus on solving Mac OS specific issues for QGIS. More than 30 MacOS QGIS users donated a little more than 3000 € for this bug fixing round.

After an effort of triage and testing, here is what has been achieved:

• The map canvas is now in HiDPI (https://issues.qgis.org/issues/17773).
  The issue was that Mac OS handles differently high DPI scaling by providing a scaling ration to scale graphics output. For more information, read http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/scalability.html#high-dpi-scaling-on-macos-and-ios and for even more info http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qpainter.html#drawing-high-resolution-versions-of-pixmaps-and-images. You may not have noticed, but the scale shown under the canvas was wrong in former QGIS 3.x versions. It has been fixed too.
• Zooming with trackpad is now fluent (https://issues.qgis.org/issues/18418) The track pad is apparently sending more events than the scrolling and are now discarded to avoid scale jumps.
• Size of mouse cursors with map tools has been fixed (https://issues.qgis.org/issues/19092). The scaling previously introduced could be removed thanks to the HiDPI fixes, and this has fixed by the same occasion the active point of the cursor being misplaced.
• The size of the map canvas at startup was not an issue in QGIS in itself and has been fixed by upgrading to a newer Qt version (https://issues.qgis.org/issues/19524)
• Rendering slowness issue *should* also have been fixed by an upgrade of Qt version (https://issues.qgis.org/issues/19546)
• At the moment, the “default” theme of QGIS (as opposed to the “Night Mapping” theme), has a few glitches when used in Mojave with “Dark” theme activated. Mainly text in widgets cannot be read since they are white on white. This is a Qt issue (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-68891) and the upcoming Qt 5.12 released by the end of november should fix it. In the mean time, the QGIS “Night Mapping” theme is automatically applied when running on Mojave with Dark theme. While the theme is probably not perfect, it allows to work properly and the situation will be evaluated again when Qt 5.12 is released.

Unfortunately, some issues remain. Mainly, the text being rendered as outlines in PDF export (https://issues.qgis.org/issues/3975) remains for now. It might be fixed in a following effort.

Thanks to all donors who helped in this effort and to Denis Rouzaud as a core developer who spent a lot of time investigating and fixing these issues!

QGIS 2.18 is the third LTR since we started this effort back in 2015 and next year will see the first LTR of QGIS 3. On this occasion, we want to learn more about our users and which versions of QGIS they use. Therefore, we invite you to our QGIS user question of the month.

If you are a MacOS QGIS user, you are probably bothered by some MacOS specific bugs. These are due to the fact that we have fewer QGIS developers working on the MacOS platform and there are additional MacOS specific issues in the underlying qt5 library.

Nevertheless, we found a developer, Denis Rouzaud, who wants to specifically look into investigating and hopefully solving several of these issues. If you are a MacOS user and care about a better QGIS experience on this platform, we invite you to financially support this effort. As a private person, and for smaller amounts, please use the usual donation channel – if you are a company or organization and want to contribute to this specific effort, please consider becoming a sponsor. In any case – please add “MacOS bug fixing campaign” as a remark when donating/sponsoring or inform [email protected] about your earmarked donation.

This effort runs from the 14th September 2018 until the 3.4 release date, due on October 26, 2018. See the QGIS road map for more details about our release schedule.

Specific issues that are looked into, are:

Thank you for considering to support this effort! Please note that some issues may also exist due to up-stream issues in the qt library. In such a case, it can’t be guaranteed if and how fast, such an issue can be fixed.

Andreas Neumann, QGIS.ORG treasurer

We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 3.2 ‘Bonn’. The city of Bonn was the location of our 16th developer meeting.

This is the second release in the 3.x series. It comes with tons of new features (see our visual changelog).

Packages and installers for all major platforms are available from downloads.qgis.org.

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 sponsors. 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 and official project sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below – our very great thank you to all of our sponsors!

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 extremely pleased to announce the winning proposals for our 2018 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 #3: Call for Grant Proposals 2018
• QGIS Grant Applications 2018

The QGIS.ORG Grant Programme aims to support work from our community that would typically not be funded by client/contractor agreements, and that contributes to the broadest possible swathe of our community by providing cross-cutting, foundational improvements to the QGIS Project.

Voting to select the successful projects was carried out by our QGIS Voting Members. Each voting member was allowed to select up to 6 of the 14 submitted proposals by means of a ranked selection form. The full list of votes are available here (on the first sheet). The second sheet contains the calculations used to determine the winner (for full transparency). The table below summarizes the voting tallies for the proposals:

A couple of extra notes about the voting process:

• The PSC has an ongoing program to fund documentation so elected to fund the QGIS Training Manual update even if this increases the total funded amount beyond the initial budget.
• Although the budget for the grant programme was €25,000, the total amount for the winning proposals is €35,500. This increase is possible thanks to the generous support by our donors and sponsors this year.
• 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).

Of the 45 voting members, 29 registered their votes 17 community representatives and 12 user group representatives.

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

A number of interesting and useful proposal didn’t make it because of our limited budget; we encourage organizations to pick up one of their choice and sponsor it.

This year’s QGIS User Conference will be embedded within the FOSS4G conference. That means that you should refer to the FOSS4G web site for all registration and event details with the exception of the QGIS Hackfest (22-26 August) which follows our normal organisation procedure on the QGIS Wiki.

There are five main activities for QGIS Users to enjoy at the conference:

1. The QGIS Hackfest: This is our twice-yearly meet up to work on and improve the QGIS code base. Come along to this event if you want contribute documentation, bug fixes, bug reports, features and other ideas for improvements to the QGIS project. The hackfest is a side event to be held on the island of Zanzibar and will happen before the main conference. Again refer to the QGIS Hackfest wiki page for details and to register.
2. The Workshops: FOSS4G is always popular for the wide range of workshops presented. The workshop presentations are very often by the developers of the software being explained, which gives you a unique opportunity to talk face to face with the people using the software you are using. There will be a number of QGIS specific workshops at FOSS4G – you will be able to identify them easily on the mobile app that provides the conference programme by filtering on ‘QGIS’ in the workshops section. For a current list of all the workshops at the event please refer to: https://2018.foss4g.org/workshop-schedule/ 
3. The Presentations: There will be a wide range of QGIS related presentations during the main conference. 17 QGIS related presentations have been registered. See https://2018.foss4g.org/programme/list-of-presentations/ for a full list of the conference presentations.
4. The Academic Track: This year a large number of academic papers have been submitted, a good number of which relate to QGIS. Watch the conference web site for more details to be published soon!
5. The QGIS Plenary / Panel Discussion: During the conference we will have an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session with QGIS developers and community members forming a panel to field any questions you might want to ask! This is a unique opportunity to find out more about the project, its roadmap or just come along to say ‘thank you’ to the dedicated team of community members who put so much work into making QGIS!

If you have not already registered for FOSS4G2018, do so now to enjoy early bird rates! Visit the Registration Page for more details! We are looking forward to meeting you in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar!

About the FOSS4G2018 Conference

The annual Free and Open Source Software 4 Geospatial. (FOSS4G) conference is the largest community gathering focused on open source geospatial software. FOSS4G brings together developers, users, decision-makers and observers from a broad spectrum of organizations and fields of operation. Through six days of workshops, presentations, discussions, and code sprints, FOSS4G participants, learn, exchange, and create new collaborations, geospatial products, standards.

FOSS4G is a global conference, with attendees from around the world! Last year, Boston, USA was the host city, before that in 2016 it Bonn, Germany. Now is the time for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania! FOSS4G 2018 will host numerous workshops over 27 – 28 August with exciting keynotes and presentations at the Julius Nyerere International Convention Centre 29 – 31 August, and finally Code Sprints and community building events September 1 & 2. In addition to bringing together the FOSS4G community in Dar, the 21st QGIS Developer meeting will take place in Zanzibar (a short 60min ferry trip away!) the 22 – 26 of August – the Geospatial Savanna is on the rise in East Africa!

The vision for the conference is to make it as accessible and inclusive as possible, bridging the gaps between the various communities that make us so strong, to make us stronger. This will be achieved through a Travel Grant Program that will enable economically disadvantaged participants the opportunity to attend, covering travel, lodging and conference costs. This will be bolstered by an exciting conference program, taking the very best that the open source geospatial community can offer. This ranges from locating schools to the instrumentation of communities with cheap, open source, 3D printed weather stations that improve community resilience to climate change.

The theme for FOSS4G 2018 is “Leave No-One Behind”. We live in a world where our users and developers have the opportunity to make a difference to the lives of everyone, whether it’s those in extreme poverty looking for access to clean water, to those using routing algorithms to calculate the fastest route to work. Location and geography are at the heart of these challenges and a FOSS4G 2018 in Dar es Salaam will invigorate our existing projects, bringing them to new users and developers while supporting and nurturing the existing community.

Dear QGIS users,

As you know, QGIS 3 has recently been published. This version introduced big changes in  the code structure that, in addition to the new functionalities already exposed, makes our code base more modern and easier to expand and improve on in the future.

As a normal by-product of such a huge overhaul, these changes also triggered a series of new issues, that you, our users are helping to discover and document. Our objective is to eliminate the most important of these issues in time for what will be our next Long Term Release (LTR) – version 3.4. This release is scheduled for October 2018. The resources available from QGIS.ORG funds are limited, and we have already invested in QGIS 3.0 far more than we have done for any previous version.

Now is a great time for users, and particularly for power users, larger institutions and enterprises, to invest in QGIS bugfixing. You have a number of different options: donating your developers’ time or hiring a developer directly to resolve the bugs that annoy you most, sponsoring our foundation, or donating to QGIS.ORG.

Our targets are:

• 20k€ within 2018-05-18 (for 3.2)
• 40k€ within 2018-09-14 (for 3.4)

If you would like to help, feel free to contact us (preferably through the qgis-users or qgis-developers mailing list, or directly to [email protected]) for further details!

Dear QGIS Community

We recently held our 2018 QGIS Annual General Meeting. The minutes of this meeting are available for all to view. As I have previously announced, I have decided to step down as chair of the PSC this year, so this post is my last official act as QGIS Chair. Thank you all for the kind words and deeds of support you gave me during my time as project chair.

I would like to welcome our new QGIS Board Chair: Paolo Cavallini, and our new QGIS Board Vice-Chair and QGIS PSC Member, Marco Bernasocchi. In case you are not familiar with Paolo and Marco, you can find short introductions to them below. I am pleased also to say that the project governance is in good hands with Richard Duivenvoorde, 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, continues to serve on the PSC as honorary PSC member. Gary 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 Paolo acting as the project chair and representative. Rock on QGIS!

Paolo Cavallini

I got involved in QGIS long ago, first as a user, then more and more deeply in various activities, initiating and supporting various plugins and core functions (e.g. GDAL Tools, DB Manager), opening and managing bugs, taking care of GRASS modules, handling the trademark registration, etc. I acted as Finance and Marketing Advisor for several years. Currently, I manage the plugin approval process. Motivation: It’s such a pleasure building up, in a truly cooperative and democratic way, together with truly intelligent people, a tool that enables people to freely do their job or pursue their interests, that I cannot resist helping as much as I can.

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 (4 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 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. Furthermore, as WorldBank consultant, I am lucky enough to be sent now and then to spread the QGIS goodness in less fortunate countries. Motivation: One of my main motivation to be part of the PSC 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 where community members can bloom and enjoy contributing in their most creative ways.

Regards

Tim Sutton (outgoing Chair)

Each year the QGIS.ORG community holds two developer meetings. These events are an important part of  our project – they provide an invaluable opportunity for us all to meet face to face and share ideas, discuss issues and plan the future of QGIS.

The host of the developer meeting gets a special bonus for hosting the meeting: One of our releases will be named after the town / village / city etc. where the event was held – like this:

We want to have a better idea of which venues we will be using for future events to help with out planning. So I am putting out a call for venue proposals:

If you would like to host a QGIS developer meeting (estimated 50 people per event) or a QGIS Conference (estimated 100-150 people per event) please contact us!

Please don’t submit proposals unless you have the authority to make such a proposal and are willing to act as the local organiser for the event. To make a proposal, fill out this form and tell us about your great venue!

Dear Voting members (and interested QGIS community members out there)

This is an open letter that was emailed to all QGIS voting members today

• Annual Reports
• Annual General Meetings
• Budgets & Financial Reports

Regards

Tim Sutton

QGIS Project Steering Committee Chair

[email protected]

NOTE: Deadline for proposals is May 15 2017

We are going back to Nødebo! Each year we combine one of our QGIS Developer Meetings with a User Conference. The User Conference is a great opportunity for QGIS users to meet developers and share their experiences – both with developers and with other users. Our first ever User Conference was held in Nødebo, Denmark in 2015 and we are thrilled to be going back to the beautiful venue at the University of Denmark’s Forest and Landscape College.

The user conference will be combined with the QGIS Developer Meeting and a summer school event, with the first week being focussed on the User Conference, the intermediate weekend on the QGIS Hackfest and the second week on the Summer School. The event will run from the 2nd of August through to the 11th of August 2017.

We would like to invite those who are interested in presenting a talk to apply now (NOTE: Deadline for proposals is May 15 2017). There are four kinds of contributions you can make (see the conference website for full details):

• 20 minute ‘lightning’ talks
• 1-2 hour short workshops
• half and full day workshops
• posters (which should be presented in the form of a map)

We have identified a number of themes for the User Conference:

• QGIS Software Development
• New Technology
• Business
• Government/Municipality
• Science
• Education

Presenters of full day workshops are eligible for a EUR 1000 reimbursement to offset their costs. You can find out more details at the conference web page (as well as registering your talk / presentation):

https://qgis2017.wordpress.com/presentations/

We are looking forward to seeing a great programme come together for the conference!

We are extremely pleased to announce the winning proposals for our 2017 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:

• Update on the QGIS Grant Programme
• QGIS Grants: Call for applications

Our intent with the QGIS.ORG Grant Programme is to support work from community that would typically not be funded by client/contractor agreements, and that contributes to the broadest possible swathe of our community by providing cross-cutting, foundational improvements to the QGIS Project.

Voting to select the successful projects was carried out by our QGIS Voting Membership. Each voting member was allowed to select up to 6 of the 13 submitted proposals by means of a ranked selection form. The full list of votes are available here (on the first sheet). The second sheet contains the calculations used to determine the winner (for full transparency). The table below summarizes the voting tallies for the proposals:

A couple of extra notes about the voting process:

• The PSC has an ongoing program to fund documentation so elected to fund the processing documentation work separately from the grant programme (note *1).
• 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.
• Because of the importance of having good packaging systems on each of the three major platforms, the PSC elected to additionally fund the work on MacOS bundling scripts (note *2).
• Although the budget for the grant programme was €20,000.00, the total amount for the four winning proposals is €19,800.00, with an additional €5, 800.00 being made available to support the processing work and and MacOS packaging work.
• Voting was ‘blind’ (voters could not see the existing votes that had been placed).

We had great participation in the voting process. Of the 27 voting members, 23 registered their votes.

On behalf of the QGIS.ORG project, I would really like to thank everyone who submitted proposals for this call. There were many interesting proposals that I believe would be of great benefit to QGIS and I hope others perusing the proposals list will use their initiative and funding interesting proposals independently if they can.

Below you can find the detailed proposals of the successful applications – we look forward to seeing the results of their work land in the code base soon!

Details of the approved grant proposals

9 ADD CONSISTENCY TO UI CONTROLS

Proposer: Nyall Dawson

Amount: €1800

Details: Across the QGIS UI, numerous inconsistencies exist in the way different properties like opacity and rotation are exposed to users. These inconsistencies make QGIS harder to use, as behavior from one dialog differs to the behavior in another dialog. Some examples of this include:

• Rotation of labels is done in the opposite direction in labeling to symbology. Accordingly, an equal rotation value will result in different rotation between labels and symbols.
• Scales are inconsistently presented, with use of both the scale numerator and denominator in different dialogs. “Minimum” and “Maximum” scales also vary between dialogs, with some dialogs using “minimum” scale as the largest scale and some using “minimum” as the smallest scale. The labeling scale based visibility controls are the biggest offenders here.
• Controls vary between specifying “opacity”, “transparency” and “alpha”. While these all have similar results, users must adopt values to map “opacity” to “transparency” in different dialogs. This is further compounded by different ranges used for each (eg 0-100%, or 0-255).

Due to the usual API freeze, it has not been possible to fix these discrepancies. The current API break introduced with version 3.0 allow a window for addressing these issues and standardizing behavior and API.

Despite the benefits in providing a consistent UI, the work involved in standardizing is fiddly (careful attention must be paid to not breaking existing projects) and repetitive, and unlikely to be undertaken by developers on a volunteer basis.  Furthermore it is highly unlikely that a commercial organisation could justify sponsoring UI standardisation efforts. Without grant funding it is unlikely that these issues will be addressed during the 3.0 development cycle, and the inconsistencies would remain for the lifetime of QGIS 3.x.

In this proposal I will:

• convert all “transparency” controls to “opacity” controls, and consult with the community to determine the ideal value range presented (0-100% or 0-255) before making all opacity controls use the same range.
• Ensure that rotation always operates in the same direction.
• Fix the labeling scale ranges to use the same scale range definitions as layer visibility
• As much as possible, automatically upgrade existing projects so that they open in QGIS 3.0 without any loss of transparency/rotation/scale settings
• (As much as possible without large refactoring), adapt the PyQGIS API so for consistent naming and use of opacity/rotation and scale setting/getting methods. Making the API consistent makes scripting QGIS and writing plugins easier.

This proposal relates to the issues described at:

• https://github.com/qgis/qgis3_UIX_discussion/issues/30
• https://github.com/qgis/qgis3.0_api/issues/18
• https://github.com/qgis/qgis3.0_api/issues/19

History: No work has currently been undertaken in this regard.

Qualifications: I am currently one of the most active QGIS developers, with a long history of quality contributions to the project. I’m passionate about seeing QGIS 3.0 address these kinds of long standing UI issues which detract from QGIS’ otherwise professional image and ease of use.

Implementation Plan:  The work will be undertaken prior to the QGIS 3.0 feature freeze period.

Proposal Link:

3 EXTEND UNIT TEST COVERAGE FOR GEOMETRY CLASSES

Proposer: Nyall Dawson

Amount: €2000

Details: Since QGIS 2.8, there has been an increased focused on creation of quality automated regression (“unit”) tests designed to flag issues in code before the code is introduced to the QGIS codebase. The increase in stability of recent QGIS versions can be directly attributed to this growth in unit testing. Despite this, many areas of the QGIS codebase remain with little or no unit test coverage.

One critical area which has insufficient unit tests is the geometry classes. The geometry classes form the basis of all geometry interpretation, algorithms, and rendering within QGIS. In order to provide stable QGIS releases, it is crucial that these fundamental classes are rock-solid, efficient, and do not suffer regressions between releases.

Some years ago (shortly after the introduction of the new geometry engine, in which support for Z/M values and curved geometries was added) I added full test coverage for the Point and Linestring classes, and partial coverage for the Polygon class. Unfortunately, writing geometry tests is tricky and time consuming. There’s many corner cases with unusual or invalid geometries which need to be tested. The time commitment required prevented me from writing additional tests, and to date the remaining classes (including multi geometries and all curved geometry types) have little or no test coverage.

This proposal covers writing additional unit tests to cover all the remaining geometry classes.

It is important to note that unit tests do NOT ensure bug free software. Unit tests only protect existing logic and avoid regressions when the covered parts of the code base are changed in future releases. Despite this disclaimer, the process of creating unit tests usually stress-tests existing code and in itself CAN reveal existing bugs. This was certainly the case when the existing tests for Point and Linestring classes were added – creation of the tests alone resulted in many fixed bugs and stabler Point and Linestring geometry handling.

History: This work would continue on from work I begun a number of years ago to provide 100% unit test coverage for the base geometry classes.

Qualifications: I have a long history of quality contributions to the QGIS project, and am currently one of the most prolific committers to the QGIS codebase. I have a long history with adding unit tests to QGIS and advocating for their increased usage amongst developers.

Implementation Plan: This work would be targeted to the QGIS 3.0 release, and would be committed to the codebase prior to the feature freeze/bug fixing period leading up to the 3.0 release.

Proposal Link:

6 PROCESSING ALGORITHM DOCUMENTATION

Proposers: Matteo Ghetta, Alexander Bruy

Amount: €4000

Details: This proposal aims to improve the existing Processing algorithms documentation. With the pull request https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3911 it is possible to add external links for the documentation (both local and remotes). However the effective use of the pull request is not yet included in Processing.

With this proposal the existing code will be incorporated in Processing, allowing to have a Short Help tab (the existing one on the right of the Processing algorithm window) and a Long Help tab (next to the Log tab).

The Short Help tab will be collapsible in order to have a bigger window for the algorithm parameters, while the Long Help tab will point to the on-line existing documentation of Processing for each algorithm (http://docs.qgis.org/testing/en/docs/user_manual/processing_algs/index.html).

The default link of the on-line documentation will be added in the QGIS Settings (thanks to the pull request already merged) in order to have the standard documentation visible but to let the user the choice to overwrite it and load custom paths.

In addition to the code part, this proposal aims also to document the GDAL/OGR provider and the QGIS core algorithms. Existing documentation will be reviewed and pictures will be added when useful, while for algorithm not yet documented, the help will be written from scratch with description and additional pictures.

Currently there are:

• 49 GDAL/OGR total algorithms, 35 to enhance with pictures, 14 to write from scratch
• 154 QGIS algorithms, 38 to enhance, 116 to write from scratch

This means a total of 73 algorithm to enhance and 130 to write from scratch.

History: The pull request https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3911 is already merged and it is worth to make it effective to have nice, rich and translatable documentation for the Processing algorithms.

Qualifications: Matteo Ghetta: working since the release 2.0 on the documentation and made several improvements and pull request to both documentation and Processing code.

Alexander Bruy: core developer since 2010, co-maintainer of the QGIS Processing framework.

Implementation Plan: The code and the documentation will be ready for the QGIS 3 release.

Proposal Link:

5 IMPROVE DEEP RELATIONS WITH POSTGRES EDITING

Proposer: Régis Haubourg

Amount: €6000

Details: QGIS has reached a mature level and offers now a very good framework to create professional applications. One of the main reasons is that QGIS is a very strong client for spatial databases, and in particular with PostgreSQL and postGIS for which it was initially created.

Since version 2.14, QGIS offers the not-so-well-known ability to handle transaction groups, which means it can instantly evaluate triggers on database side, and refresh all layers in the same transaction. This is a big win for usability, but some drawbacks glitches remain, such as the lack of the undo/redo edit buffer, a very raw way of saving (ie quitting edition session) or having the legend cluttered by so many edit symbols (a pen symbol). Current proposal is to go a step beyond to make QGIS even better for PostgreSQL by achieving the following targets:

1 Restore an undo /redo feature by taking advantage of PostgreSQL. If possible we will try to take advantage of PostgreSQL named Savepoints.

2 Allow to have some layers not switching to edit mode in QGIS,  even if they belong to the same connection. These layers will still benefit from the instant refresh, but won’t clutter the legend with the edit pen symbol everywhere, nor risk to load QGIS snapping cache for nothing. A UI for those settings could be an evolution of the current “identify layer” list in the project properties.

3 We would like to submit a mechanism to allow converting error messages raised by the provider, like a RAISE from postgres, into custom user oriented message. Say for instance, instead of a “provider error – duplicate key for… “, QGIS project could be tuned to display first “You tried to insert a feature using the same identifier as another one”.

The error message list and regexp rules would be optionally stored in qgis project or read from a datasource table (for instance when error messages rewrites are shared by other applications). The original error message would be still avaiblable by expanding the details of the messageBar and in the general message log.

4 Cherry on cake point, we wish to have QGIS take advantage of PostgreSQL NOTIFY signals to trigger behavior in QGIS when something changes in the database (see https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/sql-notify.html) . A first implementation proposal is to allow a map canvas refresh, but we can imagine really dynamic applications driven by the database events by converting NOTIFY messages into QGIS signals (oh yeah!).

History: In our team, we already use transaction groups for production tools and that is much appreciated. We already use some python logic to catch error message and convert them to more user oriented ones. We frequently develop applications where QGIS is linked with heavy database containing most of the intelligence. Having a really interactive edition process, speaking the same langage as average users, and being able to be triggered from database process will unleashed many possible applications.

Qualifications: Oslandia has three QGIS developers, two of them being core comiters and high  skills with Postgres and Postgis (core comiter too). We believe that developing using thick databases is a major strength of QGIS, and we have great fun getting involved in that area of the code

Implementation Plan:  We currently are quite involved in QGIS 3 server refactoring and major changes such as Auxiliary Storage for project or core solutions for label connectors. We also are involved in applications build on top of QGIS for Water management like QWAT or QGEP. Such changes would benefit immediatly to those project. Our target is to provide those improvements with all necessary unit tests for 3.0 release.

Proposal Link: coming soon..

13 UPDATE MACOS CMAKE BUNDLING SCRIPTS

Proposer: Larry Shaffer

Amount: €1800

Details: Currently, the macOS bundling routines (to create a self-contained QGIS.app application) in CMake scripts where created by William Kyngsburye many years ago. Since then, CMake has added many features for bundling, e.g. BundleUtilities ( https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.0/module/BundleUtilities.html), that handle similar functionality to what has been arduously maintained in the CMake scripts. While the current setup does function, it is quite antiquated and adding any new QGIS dependencies to be bundled is an error-prone ordeal. I propose to fully update the bundling routines to leverage modern CMake capabilities, since building on macOS usually uses the latest CMake versions. Once completed, anyone with appropriate dependencies should be able to produce a production-ready QGIS.app bundle, including the QGIS project itself.

History: I will first build upon the existing work to ensure there is a minimal bundled QGIS.app, then completely refactor the same functionality using a modern CMake code workflow.

​Qualifications: I have extensive knowledge in CMake and frequently utilize it in my work for my employer, Boundless Spatial. I have already completed a fully bundled QGIS.app distribution by my employer (similar to the first phase of the proposed work here), though Boundless now uses a different installation approach. I have been working for years on the OSGeo4Mac project in anticipation of producing better CMake bundling routines, to ensure the QGIS project can independently produce its own macOS distributions.

Implementation Plan: Basic work will follow these steps:

• Append minimal bundling to existing CMake setup, so there is a least a functioning bundling routine, regardless of whether the proposed work is accomplished in time for the major next release.
• Ensure the QGIS.app bundle is code-signed
• Create a new methodology, based upon CMake’s BundlesUtilities, *in-line* next to the existing CMake routines, so both can be used, until there is a valid replacement.
• Focus on minimal bundling, then add GRASS
• Continue extending bundling routines to include major Processing providers, e.g. OTB, Saga, TauDEM, etc.
• Ensure new method’s QGIS.app is properly code-signed
• Enable bundling on Travis CI infrastructure, via Travis’ cron jobs, thereby adding the capability for the QGIS project to produce fully bundled nightlies of macOS builds.
• Once new method represents a full replacement, old method will be removed, not just deprecated

Intended completion is in time for QGIS 3.0 release and packaging efforts.

Since the new method does not affect any existing code, as soon as useable functionality is achieved, it will be merged directly into master, then further code committed as work progresses.

Proposal Link: None at this time. Should I consider a QEP? Not many developers beyond the few existing packagers and experimenters would be involved. I would prefer to write a blog post after the work is completed, though post to the QGIS dev mailing list the intention to do the work, if this proposal is granted.

In February this year, we put out a call for applications for the second (yay!) round of the QGIS grant programme. The intent of the programme is to leverage donor and sponsor funding in order to support community members with great ideas to improve the underlying infrastructure of the QGIS project and code base.

We have had a really great response to the call for applications (detailed list of applications is here for your reading pleasure – 231KB download).

Given that we have 13 proposals (down 7 from our last call) and only 20,000 Euros to disburse, the QGIS voting members will need to make some tough, pragmatic choices.The voting for the grant proposals ends at the mid April 2017, and we plan to announce the successful candidates soon after that. The PSC will arbitrate in the case of a dead heat or the proposal amounts of the top voted proposals not adding up to our funding target.

Although the number of proposals submitted is down from last year, the quality and utility of the proposals this year is really top notch and it is sad to know that we will not be able to fun them all through the grant programme. If you have the wherewithal to further support some of the grant proposals that did not make the cut, or the QGIS 3.0 effort in general, please get into contact with our treasurer, Andreas Neumann (finance [at] qgis.org) or head over to our sponsorship or donations page to support their work!

Lastly, I appeal to those QGIS Voting Members who have not yet cast their votes to check your email and head over to the voting form to cast your vote!

Where is QGIS being developed?

That is a questions my students often ask. Open Source is a strange and new ‘world’ for most of them. So I try to explain: QGIS is a software, developed and maintained from all over the world by developers who are employed by companies, self-employed or working for free…

Some of the work is paid for by QGIS and some by users and as written – some do it for free – yay!  The core developers meet two times a year for ‘Hackfests’  (do not confuse with ‘Hacking’).

Sometimes a Hackfest is combined with a user conference – where developers and users can meet, listen to presentations and discuss functionality.

In 2017, the first Hackfest will take place at the Linuxhotel in Essen – Germany from Friday from 28th April – 1st May. This Hackfest is only going to be hard work for the developers – QGIS 3.0 is being developed and launched this year. More details and signing in for this weekend on the event wiki page.

The second Hackfest in 2017 will include a Summer Camp and take place in Nødebo at University of Copenhagen, Forest and Landscape College (Denmark) from Wednesday  2. August till  Friday 11. august

The Summer Camp will be a combination of work and leisure for the developers. And for users there will be workshops.

It is the first time we are having a Summer Camp at the Forest and Landscape College. We have both the place for work and the nature for exploring.

There are 28 rooms/56 beds, 3 large shelters and a large lawn where you can bring a tent sleeping bag and mattress.

Nearby the wonderful forest and lake.

The setup is as following:

Users pay for participating in workshops, food and accommodation (room/bed) – Shelter and tent are free.

Developers and workshop lecturers stays for free.

Call for workshops and sponsors: If you have a topic for a workshop or want to contribute as sponsor, please send me an e-mail at [email protected]

Save the dates – and we will send out more information about the Summer Camp later this month.

Posted on behalf of Lene Fischer, QGIS Community Organizer

In 2017 we are planning to release QGIS 3.0. This new major version will become the basis of the next LTR release (QGIS 3.2) and is set to be a sea-change in the development of QGIS. It will modernize the architecture to get rid of many legacy issues that we were unable to resolve in the minor release series of 2.x releases. For example we are switching to Qt5, Python3 stripping out deprecated API’s, cleaning away many old code artifacts, and making a huge range of under the hood tweaks to improve the performance and stability of QGIS. Here are some of the other key issues that need to be worked on before we can release QGIS 3.0:

• Refactor attribute actions

• Remove old snapping classes

• Consolidate and tidy up singletons

• Cleanup (and rename?) QgsGeometry classes

• Support loading multiple project files at once

• http://Avoid dependency to gui when not needed

• QGIS Server needs to be updated to work with QGIS 3.0

• QGIS Composer needs an overhaul

There are many more ‘under the hood’ items like this that we would like sort out before we can release QGIS 3.0.

Recently we announced the winners for our new grant programme which directly funds developers wishing to make improvements to the QGIS project. We would like to amp things up a notch further and thus with this blog post we would like to make this appeal:

• If you are an individual user please consider making a donation to the project (donations can be made by PayPal or by direct bank transfer).
• If you work for a company, please consider becoming a project sponsor. Our entry level sponsorship is not a lot of money and will make a great contribution to the project. We are still looking for our first platinum sponsor – perhaps your company could be the first! Here is the list of sponsorship levels for quick reference:

• If you are a company that makes use of contract QGIS developers, include in your contracts a provision for the developer to get your new features into the 3.0 code base with a nice set of tests so that the burden does not get passed upstream to volunteer developers to port your features to QGIS 3.0.
• If you are a company that has in-house QGIS developers, consider allocating some of their time to supporting the QGIS 3.0 development effort.
• If you are a country user group, please try to hold a funding drive within your user group and pass the funds either to the upstream QGIS.ORG project or support developers who are in your country to do bug fixing and implementation work for QGIS 3.0.

If you have other ideas about how to support the effort we will be glad to hear them! We will put as much money from QGIS.ORG funds as possible into developers that are willing and able to work on the preparation of QGIS 3.0.

A huge thank you to all of those that have already contributed time and money into the effort to get QGIS 3.0 ready for release!

The core team of QGIS strives hard to provide the most advanced and user friendly GIS for free use by everyone. In the core QGIS project, every line of code that gets committed is subject to peer review when contributed by a non core developer. This gives us an opportunity to identify and correct inadvertent (or intentional) security issues that a developer may introduce into the code base. By contrast, all of the plugins that are published via the QGIS plugin repository are reviewed by the plugin developers themselves and we don’t have good insight into how much due diligence is applied to plugin code management.

The vast majority of our plugins (listed in http://plugins.qgis.org/ and inside your copy of QGIS) are developed by third parties, either individuals, companies, and institutions. As such, they are outside our direct control and the developers often relatively unknown to the QGIS community. We view this as a potential security risk. We are convinced the risk is small, because of many factors including the “many eyes” principle (the code is visible to everybody, and in use by thousands of people), but cannot exclude the possibility that someone tries to inject malicious code into a plugin.

In order to address this situation, we looked into the opportunity of implementing automatic tools to scan plugins, before their publication, and spot potential problems. Our research indicated that this approach would be difficult and costly, and easy to circumvent.

We (the PSC) therefore decided to implement a simple yet robust approach to security, based on the ‘web of trust’ principle: we trust people we know well in the community. You will see on the http://plugins.qgis.org web site that there is a ‘Trusted Author’ tag has been applied to plugins created by those members of the community that we know and trust.

The criteria for ‘Trusted Authors’ includes those community members that regularly meet at our QGIS developer meetings, and and those that are in almost daily contact with the core team via our developer mailing lists or background project discussions. The remaining plugins (and there are wonderful, reliable, robust, and useful plugins in the list) have not been given the ‘trusted’ label.

We would be delighted if a side effect of this choice would be to stimulate more active and direct involvement of plugin developers in the QGIS community. All plugin developers are therefore invited to join us at one of the next developer meetings (AKA HackFest), or otherwise become a recognized, active member of the community, so they can be integrated as ‘trusted’ plugin developers.

In autumn last year, we ran a rather large-scale user survey, which was translated into many languages and advertised here on this blog. The final reports can be found here:

• English (1476 responses)
• Spanish (122 responses)
• French (457 responses)
• Portuguese (146 responses)
• Romanian (30 responses)

(Let me know if you have links to other language versions which were not sent to the mailing list.)

Looking at the English report, most responses were filed by regular (49.7%) and advanced users (35.9%) who use QGIS at least several times per week. One interesting result is that responders feel that the project should still prioritise new features when spending funds:

Top 3 “highest priority for spending QGIS funds”

1. Important features that are missing (50%)
2. More bugfixing (24.1%)
3. Improved user documentation (12.4%)

This is also confirmed by the free comments section were roughly 23% of responders were asking for new features, 19% called for more stability (fewer releases and new features), and 9% for better documentation.

Documentation improvements were followed closely by calls for a more structured approach to plugins (making it easier to find the right tool for the job), stricter plugin documentation requirements, consolidation of plugins with similar functionality, and integration of key plugins into core.

When interpreting these results, it’s important to keep in mind that responses are skewed towards experienced users, who are more likely to require specialist functionality. Beginners on the other hand might rank stability, ease of use of core functionality, and good documentation higher.

We are pleased to announce the first round of funding for the QGIS grant programme.

What is the grant programme?

The QGIS.ORG grant programme is our way to accelerate and streamline development of the QGIS.ORG project by rewarding committed developers and contributors for their work through a grant system. It is a way to distribute our funds amongst our team members in a fair and transparent way.

Why have a grant programme?

There are four main reasons for embarking on a grant programme.

1. The first intent of the grant programme is to amplify the contributions of grantees by allowing them to spend more time on QGIS over and above what they would be able to do on a purely volunteer basis. At the broader level we would also like to avert the potentially negative reaction to funded development work in QGIS: “Why should I donate my time to work on QGIS when others are paid to do it?” And rather create an aspirational environment: “If I make a large contribution to QGIS I could also be eligible for a grant like other dedicated contributors have received.”
2. To simplify the decision making process for how to spend the funds received in the QGIS project via our Sponsorship and Donations programmes. The grant programme would allow us to streamline our decision making when it comes to funding developers. We receive many proposals for funding various activities in QGIS which invariably lead to protracted debate. In addition, not having a cohesive plan for how to disburse QGIS funds results in funding being done in a very ad hoc manner – which in turn results in a skew of funding towards development related activities and away from other critical project activities such as improvement of user documentation, API documentation, sysadmin tasks and so on.
3. To get things done that volunteers don’t naturally gravitate towards doing, such as housekeeping, maintenance and so on.
4. To transparently spend QGIS.ORG funds to advance the QGIS project.

In this funding round, we are ring-fencing EUR 20,000 for the grant programme. We expect to run further grant calls in the future if this round proves to be a success and as funds allow.

Applicants may submit more than one proposal and the proposal may be on any topic that you think is relevant and beneficial to the greater QGIS community. Some examples of the kinds of topics you could propose are:

• Updating and improving documentation
• Updating and improving QGIS.org web infrastructure
• Implementing a new feature in QGIS
• Curating the pull request queue
• Bug fixing
• Improving API documentation
• Improving the API and help making QGIS 3.0 a reality
• Rewriting and improving a part of the code base
• A security review of QGIS
• Helping new QGIS devs to get started with improved developer documentation and utilities
• etc.

The closing date for applications is Thursday, 15 September 2016

PLEASE NOTE: All applications made here will be PUBLICLY VISIBLE, including your name.

FAQ:

Here are a list of frequently asked questions relating to the grant call. Please check back on this article regularly – we will update it as any new questions are raised so that everyone may benefit from the answers.

1) Q: Are collaborative proposals allowed?

A: One person should be the proposal lead though. Additional collaborators can be mentioned in the proposal details section.

2) Q: Can I make a proposal for a smaller amount?

A: Yes

3) Q: Can I make a proposal for a larger amount?

A: No

4) Q: Can I charge VAT / additional expenses on top of the grant allocation?

A: No, the amount should be all-inclusive.

5) Q: How will the grant awards be decided?

A: Grant applications will be decided on by vote of the QGIS Board Voting Members

6) Q: Can the grant be made on behalf of my company or a group of people?

A: Yes. Just note that any application you make should be inclusive of all costs, VAT, Taxes etc.

7) Q: How many grants will be awarded from the 20,000 Euros?

A: We expect to award at minimum two grants, possibly more if there are a number of smaller grant proposals that are worthwhile.

8) Q: Can I make more than one application?

A: Yes

9) Q: Is this like Google Summer of Code – a mentorship programme?

A: No. We will not provide mentorship – we expect that you are already an established developer or contributors to the QGIS project and do not need any ‘hand holding’ other than via normal community consultation processes like QEP’s.

10) Q: I am thinking of submitting a proposal to do XYZ. Would that be considered a valid proposition?

A: We don’t have any specific pre-conceived ideas of what a valid proposal is, so I would encourage you to make a submission if you think it is worthwhile. During the decision about which proposals to access, we will consider factors like:

• how broadly useful the proposal is to all our users,
• how unlikely is it that the feature or improvement would be done without Grant funding,
• how much ‘value’ does the work bring to the project,
• how feasible is it that the applicant will actually achieve their goals etc.

11) Q: Have you thought of how to handle situations where person A submits a proposal and, later, person B submits the same proposal but cheaper?

A: In these cases, we will use criteria such as the applicant’s standing in the community, the technical details of their implementation plan, etc. Price would probably be a low-weighted factor but certainly could enter into it if there is a significant difference.

12) Q: I’ve read that QGIS 3 might land in first quarter of 2017 (if everything goes well). Do you expect proposals to be tied to QGIS 3? Should bug fixes, plugins, PyQGIS book translations, should they be planned, developed, and tested against QGIS 3’s code base?

A: Where proposals relate to the code base, yes we would expect that they are ‘3.0 ready’ – though they do not necessarily have to be completed when 3.0 is released.

13) Q: Do you have an indication of how long it will take for the grants to be awarded after the closing date?

A: It’s a bit hard for me to say how long it is going to take. The process will entail asking the QGIS voting community to rank all the proposals. Depending on how many proposals we receive we will need to allow for sufficient time of this to happen. We hope we can do it within a month of the closing date for applications but it we get a hundred proposals we will need more time probably….
Q: I still have questions, who can I ask?

A: Please contact [email protected] if you have further questions, or write to the pic mailing list.

How to apply:

To apply please use this online form

Time flies when you are having fun! It seems like only yesterday that I was writing about the 14th Hackfest in Gran Canaria. At the end of May 2016, we held the 15th QGIS hackfest! QGIS has been on an incredible journey since the project was started by Gary Sherman 14 years ago, and the fact that the hackfest was held in tandem with the 2nd QGIS International User conference is a testament to the growth and strength of the project.

2nd International QGIS Conference

Isn’t it amazing – we just held the second international QGIS User’s Conference! We really need to give credit to the amazing team who ran a totally seamless operation to organise the event: Gemma Pons, Toni Hernández, Josep Sitjar, Alexandre Busquets, Ferran Orduña, Rosa Olivella, Laura Olivas, & Lluís Vicens

We would like to give a special thank you to the University of Girona’s Director of GIS Service (SIGTE) – Gemma Boix who helped to organised the event as well as ensuring the institutional support for the event. In case I have missed mentioning someone by name, our thanks to all the other volunteers and the sponsors of the conference. Not only did the conference team host the conference event, they also covered a large part of the costs of the hackfest that followed the conference – for which we can’t thank them enough! OSGeo also supported the hack fest financially for which we are extremely grateful.

The conference team also extends their thanks to the attendees and presenters, instructors and developers who also actively participated on the event!  For those interested in viewing the various talks at the conference, here are some handy links:

• Sides from all talks
• Videos for conference presentations

State of QGIS

The QGIS.org project is in a very healthy state right now. For my talk at the user conference (video here) I got some fresh download stats from our servers and the numbers are quite astounding: QGIS 2.8 LTR (release Feb 2015) has been downloaded over 679, 000 times for the Windows Standalone installer (which includes all bug fix releases). Even after controlling for overestimates (from bot downloads, multiple downloads per user, “try and don’t use”) and underestimates (single downloads being distributed to many users) it is clear that we have an extremely large and constantly growing user base. By another metric, our most popular plugin, the OpenLayers plugin has been downloaded over 700 000 times!

Something else that is clear from the make up of the talks, workshop topics and attendees at the user conference and hackfest: QGIS is increasingly moving from single user environments to large multi-user deployments. This ‘edge of network effect’ is a common phenomenon in FOSS and is largely how Linux came to be such a lynchpin in the dev-ops world. Sys admins and (in the case of QGIS) GIS power users, test out the software on their own devices, see the potential for it in their workplace and start integrating it into their workflows in the office until eventually it has become a mission critical piece of software for an organisation.

One thing my slides probably do not make clear is that there is a huge amount of investment being made into QGIS and plugins for QGIS to fulfil a wide variety of needs. These investments are largely external to the project (i.e. not factored into the financial figures I mentioned in the talk) and happen in direct client-to-developer relationships completely bypassing (from a financial sense) the upstream  QGIS.ORG project. This is a really good model since we do not need to deal with contract delivery, competing interests etc.

If we do a simple calculation based on direct QGIS.org revenue for 2015/2016 (around EUR 69, 000) to downloads, the average revenue per download of QGIS 2.8.x was around EUR 0.10. All of the money we receive into the project goes into improving the QGIS, maintaining infrastructure and funding travel and accommodation for hackfests. I mention these numbers both because they are interesting and because it is good to emphasise how incredibly grateful we are to each and every one of our sponsors and donors that support the project. We really do run on a shoe-string budget and we have audacious goals and a vision to put spatial decision making tools into the hands of everyone on the planet who wants to use them. Your sponsorship and donations are a key enabler to making this vision a reality!

By the way, my apologies for not mentioning Gary Sherman (our project founder) by name at the start of my talk – that was totally unintentional! Before I talk about the main activities, let me make a quick aside to mention the small excursion we took:

Underwater autonomous vehicles & QGIS

One of the really cool things we did at the hackfest was take a little side trip to visit the Computer Vision and Robotics Institute. Natália Hurtós (who works for the institute) kindly gave a bunch of us QGIS geeks a tour. The work they are doing building [relatively] cheap underwater autonomous vehicles is really awesome and inspiring – all the more so because Natalia is planning to build the mission planning tool using QGIS libraries!

Ok so what actually happened at the hackfest? Lets dig in and find out!

Cool stuff from the QGIS Hackfest

I am only going to focus on the hackfest here because the videos from the talks at the QGIS User Conference have been posted online (see above), so you can take in all the QGIS goodness you like from those. There was a lot going on at the hackfest, so these are only the nuggets I managed to cherry-pick from the talks.

Give processing some love

During the hackfest and user conference, Victor Olaya (lead developer for the QGIS processing framework) really did a great job of promoting the idea of writing processing plugins rather than ‘normal’ plugins. His argument is that most plugins that are intended to provide single purpose analytical capabilities (we are looking at you geeks about to write the 300th buffer plugin!) would  be better off implemented as processing plugins:

• the plugin author would not need to spend valuable time writing user interfaces, input validators and so on.
• users of the plugins could chain the tool into complex workflows easily, rather than only being able to use it on a once off basis.
• we would grow the amount of options available in the processing toolbox while at the same time reducing the sometimes overwhelming amount of choice in the QGIS Plugin Manager.

ILWIS processing tools coming soon

Also on the topic of plugins, Bas Restsios from the ILWIS Project gave a demo of the ILWIS software in order for QGIS developers to be more aware of its capabilities. Although currently Windows only, the ILWIS developers are in the process of porting the software to be based on the Qt5 framework, which means us Linux and OSX users will get to enjoy using it too soon. ILWIS is Open Source and does its rendering using OpenGL. Because of their smart rendering system, everything draws lightning fast. ILWIS packs in many remote sensing tools and raster analysis tools and should be on anyone’s radar if they are interested in FOSSGIS. The best part (from my point of view) is that Bas and his team members are also busy creating a set of processing plugins for QGIS that call out to ILWIS’s command line tools. This means you can expect a huge leap forward in the number of raster based analysis functions you can do with QGIS in the near future.

GeoPackage, JPEG2000, WFS improvements

It was really great to have Even Rouault (maintainer of GDAL/OGR) present at the hackfest. Even recently received core committer rights to the QGIS code repository and has been making great contributions by adding support for the OGC Geopackage format (death to shapefiles!). The shapefile format is long in the tooth and doesn’t serve the GIS community well as a de facto standard for GIS data interchange. It also doesn’t make a good format for intermediate  representation of data processing outputs (e.g. when using multi algorithm processing models). Even has also been working on improvements to WFS support in QGIS which many will appreciate.

Not directly related to QGIS, but Even also mentioned he has been giving the GDAL driver for JPEG2000 some love – gaining good performance increases. This gives me some hope that there will be a viable open format alternative to ECW and MrSid in the future – something which QGIS will benefit from greatly. One of the interesting things that GDAL supports with the JPEG2000 specification is embedded vectors – you can write the raster with gdal_translate and then during creation pass a shapefile or GML stream to the gdal_translate command. I look forward to the day (not currently on the roadmap) where we can ship JP2 images with embedded vector masks and use those embedded vectors  seamlessly in QGIS.

Planning for 3.0 release

We did some planning for the 3.0 release of QGIS and, in particular, fine tuned the plans for how we will manage the transition from QGIS 2.x to 3.x. In February 2016 I posted an outline of the general approach we planned to follow. Some developers felt that we would be better off having the core of the 3.0 transition work happening on the master branch of QGIS so that it has more attention and testing focussed on it. I guess there are two main interest groups to consider here, so I will break down the outcome between take-home points for developers and general users:

For developers:

• 2.16 gets released off master.
• After 2.16 we create a 2x branch and the 2x branch will be put into caretaker mode.
• Support for Qt4 and Py2 will be discontinued in master and we do packaging only against Qt5 and Py3.
• Once Qt5 and Py3 only are supported in master, nightly build packages may not be immediately available on master as we need to get the packaging systems update.
• After 2.16 is released API breaking changes will be allowed in master (but code must build and packaging not broken, plugins will be broken).
• All API breaking changes should be annotated by means of a Doxygen page patch to indicate what changes were made.
• We target the API change window to end in Feb 2017 so that we can have a 3.0 release in March 2017.
• We may do a 2.18 release off the 2x branch  if there have been substantial changes in the 2x branch. If there are no substantial changes in the 2x branch following 2.16, we will not do a 2.18 release.
• In January 2017 we will have a review to establish if all the API breaking changes are complete. If someone has specific implementation plans that are in progress and they need more time, we will (under agreement from the dev community) extend the API breaking window and may push out the release date.
• Following the release of 3.0 we will implement API freeze again and polish up the codebase for an LTR release based on 3.2
• 2.14 LTR support will be extended until 3.2 is ready
• Note: for QGIS 3.x, a minimum of Qt 5.5 is recommended
• Note: for QGIS 3.x a minimum of Python 3.4 is recommended
• Note: We are looking for a volunteer to set up a  windows build system using vagrant on win 7 so that we can test and build automaticallyl

For General Users

We propose that for general users, you rather share the following more easy to digest bullet list as it does not contain all the technical details above that mainly developers will care about.

• 2.18 release is not guaranteed
• We are planning a 3.0 release in March 2017
• This release date may be postponed – we will do a review in January to establish whether we are on track for the release date
• The 3.0 release will break your plugins – we will publish a migration guide and tools to help you migrate your plugin to the new platform
• If you have any queries about the process please feel free to contact us (via the developer or user mailing lists preferably)

Style repository

Akbar Gumbira, our Google Summer of Code (GSOC) student joined us at the hackfest. For his GSOC project, Akbar is working on a unified way to share styles, symbols, ramps and markers in QGIS. The idea will be very similar to the QGIS plugin repository, where users can host their favourite cartographic elements for everyone else to enjoy. There was quite a lot of technical discussion about the exact mechanisms to use for hosting shared symbology with the key elements of the debate being about whether to use git as a hosting system, simple zip files or some other mechanism. If you wish to chat to Akbar about his work, visit this chat room or comment on the QEP.

OSX Packaging and Building

QGIS is an attractive proposition for OSX users since the big commercial vendors typically don’t support OSX. Since QGIS is built on cross platform technologies, this does not pose a huge limitation for us, but there are few OSX developers in the QGIS developer team and the platform requirements and constraints are pretty complex. Larry Shaffer has been doing awesome work to cut through the various issues and simplify the installation process – both for end users and for developers. It’s finally pretty easy to get a development environment up and running on a Mac now. Using brew (a package manager for OSX) you can install all the needed dependencies and get  QGIS compiling in Qt Creator with full debugging support. The next challenge is going to be supporting this under Qt5 for QGIS 3.0 and Larry has been doing a bunch of great work to make that happen.

Lizmap!

There are several web client frontends for QGIS out there. Lizmap is probably the most feature rich of them. Michaël Douchin (@kimaidou on twitter) showed off the latest version of Lizmap. If you are doing any web mapping, you really should check it out!

QField

Marco Bernasocchi showed off the work they have been doing on QField – an Android app for your mobile device. The workflow for using QField is simple: Create a QGIS project on your desktop, copy it over to your device’s SD Card or internal storage, then open the same project on your device. Since it uses the same QGIS 2.14 backend as you are probably running on your desktop, all the cartographic elements from your desktop are supported – including the new 2.5D rendering. The main use case for QField is field data collection and new in QField is the ability to capture point data and edit / update feature attributes. This opens many possibilities for asset management and field survey work.

Marco shared some roadmap plans for QField including broader support for form elements. Value maps are already implemented, value relations, date and picture support are coming soon!. There is also beta support for digitising lines which should land in your installed version soon. I am eagerly looking forward to seeing how QField develops!

During the hackfest I did some testing of QFied using a PostGIS layer in a project with the data coming from a remote QGIS server – and it works (assuming you have internet connectivity). I also did some testing using BTSync to create a synchronised file system between my mobile device and my desktop. Edits to layers on the desktop and the mobile device can easily be pushed back and forth, making it very very easy to push out maps and new data to workers in the field.

Testing

There were lots of interesting things going on for those interested in testing. Alessandro Pasotti showed off some really cool stuff he has been working on for running python tests directly in QGIS instead of using a mock QGIS iface object. There are huge benefits to doing this since your tests run in  a ‘real’ QGIS environment. He also showed off how they are testing QGIS plugins in Docker using the above mentioned technique.

If you do need / want to use an mock iface object, Matthias Kuhn has been promoting the use of the new qgis.testing python module improvements which includes an iface object which is comprehensive in terms of API stubs. For pythonistas:

from qgis.testing import start_app, unittest 

Matthias has also created a unittest subclass that you can use which includes nice goodies like letting you do asserts that geometries match.

Matthias Kuhn, Nyall Dawson and others have really been leading the charge to build a more comprehensive test suite in QGIS and there were lots of other interesting tips and tricks been shown like how to make your travis tests run against multiple versions of QGIS – which can be very handy for plugin authors.

Victor Olaya also showed off the tester plugin – for automated GUI testing based on recorded interaction sequences.

Nice things for developers

Martin Dobias showed off some of the tools they have been developing including:

• The report plugin (see http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/report/) that lets you trap python exceptions and send a bug report directly to a github issue tracker.
• Martin also showed of the First Aid plugin which lets you capture tracebacks in a more elegant way and also debug your plugin, stepping through the code and execute python instructions in the current run context. The First AID plugin makes a great alternative to using remote debugging from an IDE which is time consuming to set up and technical for less experienced developers to do.

Training plugin

Victor Olaya showed of a plugin (the Lessons plugin) they are working on to facilitate interactive training in QGIS. It uses a simple dock interface to guide the user through a series of activities. Interestingly you can ask it to play recorded macros (saved as python code) of the active being explained so that you can see how it is done if you can’t figure it out yourself. Their authoring system also allows you to record these  macros.

Docker

Docker is increasingly becoming a useful building block for those wishing to deploy QGIS in server side contexts. Patrick Valsecchi and Stéphane Brunner did some really awesome work refactoring the QGIS Server docker image – you can get a preview here  https://github.com/pvalsecc/QGIS/tree/docker (read the README for usage notes). Patrick’s work strips down the size of the docker image to make it much less of an overhead to pull the image. We would like to eventually merge this into the upstream QGIS repo so that we have a versioned docker build set up for each QGIS release.

Crayfish

Martin Dobias showed off the Crayfish plugin. Crayfish includes some really awesome multi temporal visualisation tools – really useful if you have time slice data in NetCDF or similar formats and you want to view layers sequentially as animations. It also has cool symbology additions to show flow / directionality arrows over your raster.

GeoNode QGIS Server Demo

Etienne Trimaille demonstrated the work he, Ismail Sunni and Rizky Maulana have been doing to implement a QGIS Server backend for GeoNode. GeoNode is a spatial content management system that allows you to easily upload and share geospatial data on the web. With their implementation you can upload a shape file or TIFF along with a QGIS .qml style file and the layer is published directly as a tile service in the original QGIS styling. Bye-bye hard do create SLD’s, hello easy to create QGIS styles. (Disclaimer: I work with Etienne, Ismail and Rizky so I am tooting our own horn a bit here).

Documentation

The work of the documentation team is often overlooked in the frenzy to enjoy the new cool stuff that developers churn out. Take a look over at the documentation GitHub pulse page to see how just as much effort is going on in the documentation work. During the hackfest Yves Jacolin and the rest of the documentation team were hard at work getting things ready for the next QGIS Manual release. If you are able to lend a hand with the documentation effort (no coding skills required), please do contact Otto Dassau, the QGIS Documentation Lead!

Lightning talks

Here is also a quick-fire list of features that were shown off -that are coming down the QGIS conveyor belt – mostly for QGIS 2.16 but also new plugins and other efforts:

• Style dock in QGIS 2.16 with undo / redo – Nathan Woodrow
• Dynamic hillside rendering – Nathan Woodrow
• Awesome new gradient editor – Nyall Dawson
• D3 & Plotly charting with chart interaction showing on the layer – Matteo Ghetta and Michael Douchin
• Forms improvements: the ‘drag and drop’ editor will support multiple columns – Matthias Kuhn
• Table view will be able to filter which columns to show (to let you hide unwanted columns) – Matthias Kuhn
• Action widget columns in the attribute table: you can place one or more action widgets (and icons) into the attribute table making it very easy to fire off an action (e.g. python script) for a particular record – Matthias Kuhn
• Support for changing column order display in attribute table – Matthias Kuhn
• In composer you can get have JSON of all layer relations that you can use in your html widget – Nyall Dawson
• Aggregation in expressions. We will explain this more in the visual changeling for the next release, but you will be able to compute attribute aggregates (e.g. sum of areas) in your reports – Nyall Dawson
• Default values for fields – Matthias Kuhn showed upcoming work to add support for field defaults in when adding a new record to a vector layer.
• Transaction groups / cascaded editing mode when you are editing a feature so that related tables get put into edit mode (project property needs to be enabled) – again we will explain this more in the upcoming 2.16 changelog – Matthias Kuhn
• SectorPlot plugin: a plugin to let you make ‘pizza plots’ of your data – Raymond Nijssen and Richard Duivenvoorde
• Denis Rouzaud showed off work he has been doing to create a standard settings dialog that you can use in your plugins. It has support for different input types and layer chooser etc. They provide a settings dialog base class that you can derive from in your plugin which will take care of reading and writing your settings to Settings.
• User profiles plugin – lets you create customised user interface for different user categories – Alex Bruy
• Georeferenced PDFs and outputs from composer (sorry not yet GeoPDF) but you can use composer to create a  PDF – and then add that into QGIS just like any other raster layer. Nyall Dawson
• Nyall Dawson chatted about his work on QGIS Task manager – a tool to let you easily create concurrent background tasks and show the progress of each task in a simple UI. I believe he is looking for funding to help him get this finished, so if you are interested please contact him.
• Bivariate legends plugin (not published yet).  Thomas Gratier showed off work he is doing to support the creation of bivariate legends.

Albireo QGIS Fork

Sandro Mani showed off an awesome new QGIS front end they have been working on at Sourcepole. Their implementation creates a brand dew ribbon based UI paradigm for QGIS (don’t scoff, it’s actually pretty cool!). They have pared down the number of features and grouped functionality into discrete areas, both the menus and ribbon icons changing based on the context of what you are doing. You can see the source code here: https://github.com/sourcepole/kadas-albireo.  Here are some bullet notes I made while watching his presentation:

• 3D Globe updates to get it ready for production use. They have also integrated the 3D extrusion support and lots of improvements to the globe that Matthias Kuhn did as part of his masters thesis. Its really exciting to think that these improvements may make their way into the official QGIS builds sometime soon and we can all enjoy them.
• Redlining – you can sketch onto the map without saving those geometries in a specific layer.
• Measuring & profile tools
• Shift-drag for zoom – just like you can do in OpenLayers and Leaflet (Nyall then went and added this to QGIS for 2.16 – yay!)
• Switch coordinate reference systems used for cursor position display easily from the status bar

There were many other cool features – some of them may make their way into the mainstream QGIS desktop. If you are looking to support users who need a simplified QGIS user interface, Albireo QGIS spin off is something to watch.

Conclusion

Girona was an absolutely awesome venue for the QGIS Conference and Hackfest. I hope the participants of the conference gained good benefit from the experience. The hackfest had around 50 participants and beyond the above notes, there was such a lot going on including work on the documentation system, discussions on the proposed community voter system (more on that in a follow up blog post) and many other things. I really encourage you to attend these events if you want to keep track of the leading edge of QGIS developers.

One thing we have been encountering lately in the QGIS project is plugin authors not understanding the licensing requirements for publishing their QGIS plugins. In this article I will try to clarify this a little:

QGIS is Open Source Software and provides a great platform for third parties to distribute additional functionality to users through our plugin system. QGIS is licensed under the GPL version 2 or greater. This license is provided with every copy of the QGIS and in the source code and is available on our web site here:

http://docs.qgis.org/2.0/en/docs/user_manual/appendices/appendices.html

Under the terms of this license, it is a requirement that all plugins distributed via http://plugins.qgis.org (or through other repositories that may be self-hosted) should comply with the GPL version 2 or greater license. In particular all code included in any plugin should be made clearly and easily available in source form. It has come to our attention that some plugin authors are distributing plugins that do not comply with this condition.

We ask you to consider the fact that many thousands of hours of work and large amounts of financial outlay from individuals and companies has gone into the creation of QGIS. This work is done under the basis that in-kind contributions raise the quality and capabilities of the platform for everyone. When you create a plugin, you only need to spend a minimal amount of effort to solve your specific requirements because we have done the rest of the work needed to provide an entire platform for you and our community of users. This is a key value proposition of Open Source: ‘a rising tide floats all boats’.

By publishing the source code for your plugin, others may inspect the underlying code of your plugin and learn from it and use that knowledge to further improve the platform. Not releasing your source code breaks this model. Besides being a contravention of the licensing conditions under which you received the QGIS software, withholding your source code does not advance the body shared knowledge, and does not embrace the spirit of sharing that has made the QGIS project such a success to date.

Thus if you are a plugin author who is distributing your plugin without the accompanying source code, you need to be aware that the source code needs to be made available to each person who receives the binary sources for your plugin.

One query that plugin authors have raised is whether the requirement to publish the sources of their plugin precludes their ability to sell or otherwise commercially benefit from their plugin work. This is not the case – you can sell you plugin as long as you make  the sources of your plugin available under the same license as QGIS to each purchaser.

Should you have any queries about how to better collaborate within the QGIS community we are available to you – please direct your queries to [email protected]