With the QGIS Grant Programme 2022, we were able to support four proposals that are aimed to improve the QGIS project, including software, infrastructure, and documentation. The following reports summarize the work performed in the proposals.
- Support building QGIS application on Qt 6 (#243) – Report
In addition to the original plan of porting the “gui” and “app” libraries to Qt 6, it was possible to complete also the “3d” and “server” libraries. We now are at a stage where the majority of QGIS builds and runs without any significant issues on Qt 6. The Github CI setup has been updated to also run the C++ tests for gui, app, server and 3d, and the majority of these have been fixed so that they pass on the Qt 6 builds too. In addition, some tests which were failing under Qt 6 revealed some real QGIS bugs which have been fixed in the process of this work. (So there’s a direct benefit for the existing Qt 5 builds too!). - Add SQL Logging in the debugging/development panel (#242) – Report
When debugging or developing a QGIS algorithm or a QGIS plugin and when investigating performances of a particular layer it is often useful to view the SQL commands that QGIS sends to the backend. The SQL logging was implemented for Postgres, GeoPackage, Spatialite and Oracle data providers.
- QGIS setting registry follow-up (#245) – Report
The work can mainly be seen here PR qgis/QGIS#51295 with the proposed approach to register settings in a hierarchical and organized way, without too much complexity in the API to actually use the settings.
To have a clean approach, some keys have been renamed. There is a compatibility handling (both forward and backward). The GUI implementation will be worked on during the HF in NL this spring. - Fix handling of provider default value clauses/Autogenerate/nextval(…) handling (#247) – Report
The bulk of these changes landed in the QGIS 3.28 release. A quick way to demonstrate on of the issues fixed is: open a Geopackage file, start editing the layer, add some features to it, but don’t save the edits, then right click the edited layer and try to save it to a different file. On older QGIS releases you’ll be spammed with a number of error messages because we tried to write a string value of “Autogenerate” into a number field for all the newly created features. On QGIS 3.28 this all just works as expected, with no errors encountered.
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!