Hi Andreas,
Am 28.07.2015, 21:54 Uhr, schrieb Andreas Neumann <a.neum...@carto.net>:
Hi Arni,
I think the QGIS community should start an effort to better support the
Geopackage format (or any OGR format) - and should spend >some financial
resources to allow a developer to work several days to improve support
for the Geopackage format. I suggested that >to the QGIS PSC, but it
doesn't seem to be a priority at the moment. Other issues seem to be
more pressing (such as bug fixing, >infrastructure, developer meetings).
However, any organization can come up and fund development to improve
the situation. Or start a crowd-funding initiative to >collect financial
ressources from several organizations/people. It is just that noone had
enough resources (money or time) to get >rid of the Shapefiles in many
places.
it is easily said, that the community should start an effort, but how
should this be organized, if it's not organized by the organization
already existing?
You have a much better insight into the structure and the people involved
than most of us.
The recent crowd-funding initiatives I witnessed (and donated for) were
successfull, even though the average users presumably had no idea what the
subjects were about (automated testing:
http://blog.vitu.ch/10102014-1046/crowdfunding-initiative-automated-testing
, GRASS Plugin upgrade:
http://www.gissula.eu/qgis-grass-plugin-crowdfunding/ )
But those initiatives came from the developers themselves, who exactly
know what has to be done, how much time it will take, and how much money
has to be there to get things done.
To start an arbitrary crowd-funding initiative just by anyone, with no
idea how to actually define the goal and not even having a developer at
hand is possible, but is it a good idea?
When things then go wrong, the hole way of supporting the project will be
discredited.
Quite some while ago, I made the proposal to set up a website, where
people could search or post feature requests, which could be up- or
downvoted by other users, which could be managed/moderated/combined/split
by "experts" and after some time, for the best-rated proposal(s), a
crowd-funding initiative would be started.
The echo on this proposal from the "officials" was not really
enthusiastic. Reasons: No time, no money, not enough developers.
Vicious circle completed...
QGIS is a developer-driven project, and I can imagine that the devs prefer
a sponsor with a defined goal and 5.000€.
I can maybe donate 25€ on something (ahh, I would even spend 50€ to get
rid of f... shape files, and I'm sure that we would find another 100
people feeling the same).
The most difficult problem to solve is Processing with SAGA, but other
than that, at least the "Save AS" and the vector menu could >be improved
to offer e.g. Geopackage as default, or let the user choose any OGR
format.
If you would start such an initiative I would very much support it. And
who knows - maybe even the QGIS PSC would partially >support such an
initiative (maybe also financially).
Wouldn't it be better to start a crowd-funding initiative with the goal,
to set up a proper regime for crowd-funding feature requests by setting up
the necessary infrastructure (website), paying someone to take care of the
requests and deal with possible developers?
May sound a bit weird, but still better than the frequent "You could hire
someone to code this feature"-answers on this list.
But who would organize this?
... in the vicious circle again ...
I nevertheless love QGIS :)
Bernd
Andreas
On 28.07.2015 18:20, Árni Geirsson wrote:
Thank you Alex - that answers my question completely.
Arni
Árni Geirsson
Alta ehf // +354 582 5000 // +354 897 9549www.alta.is // Alta á
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On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Alex Mandel
<tech_...@wildintellect.com> wrote:
It's more elaborate than that. Not all applications in the toolbox can
read Spatialite yet either (e.g. SAGA). So the intermediate is
something
all the tools can use. At some point the toolbox might get developed to
were any ogr data source can be used for the intermediates, but it
isn't
there yet. I ran into this issue with Postgis a couple of years ago,
and
the whole point of using Postgis was to escape the limitations of the
shapefile (particularly file size).
In some ways if you use Spatialite or Postgis you don't actually need a
lot of the basic tools as those can all be done with SQL via the DB
Manager or QSpatialite.
As for Geopackage, keep in mind it's an exchange format. Even with 2.8
I've had no issues reading GPKG files in, though I've been creating
them
with ogr2ogr on the command line to convert whole databases at a time
between Spatialite and other formats.
Shapefile still remains the lowest common denominator. I agree other
formats should be suggested first by the save dialog since shp can
cause
data loss (date/time, field names, etc).
Thanks,
Alex
On 07/28/2015 09:04 AM, Árni Geirsson wrote:
Thanks for the answer Jim. I understand that the shapefiles are lingua
franca but to me that would imply that they should be used when
exchange
with other applications is needed - which is not always. But I had not
realized that I might be constraining the set of available tools if I
use
SpatiaLite. Does this mean that if I have my date in SpatiaLite, many
of
the tools in the Processing toolbox would not be available to me?
Arni
Árni Geirsson
*Alta ehf* // +354 582 5000 // +354 897 9549
www.alta.is // Alta á Twitter <http://twitter.com/alta_ehf> // Alta á
Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alta/161795813838691?v=wall>
On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 3:54 PM, James Keener <j...@jimkeener.com>
wrote:
More tools support it. Spatialite wasn't supported in esri until very
recently and other tools may not support anything but shape files.
It's
become a lingual franca, and like English: it's terrible, but works
well
enough.
Jim
On July 28, 2015 11:38:24 AM AST, "Árni Geirsson" <a...@alta.is>
wrote:
Hello
I find it interesting that the ancient shapefile format is (or at
least
appears to be) the default file format for QGIS when SpatiaLite
seems to be
a much more capable format. I have been using mostly shapefiles and
when
using for example the tools under the vector menu, intermediate
results are
saved as shapefiles, leading to a big pile of files after a short
session
of vector processing. Now, I have discovered that by using the
processing
tools the intermediates can be temporary files (still shapefiles,
just
hidden away in a temporary folder). After saving a temporary file
as a
SpatiaLite file, I can enter field names longer than 10 characters
but I
can not add a text field that accommodates more than 255 characters.
So my question is: Why is the shapefile format the default?
I have also noticed that with 2.10 I can save in Geopackage format.
Does
that mean that support for this format has improved?
Any insights are highly appreciated.
Arni Geirsson
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