Hi devs, I'd have sort of an early announcement, but also a related question:
we're currently developing a proper network analyst toolkit as a plugin. We feel it's another important step to make ArcMap/Pro more redundant haha one can dream:) In any case, the plan is to provide highly performant network analysis, such as complex VRP solvers, location/allocation, regular routing/isochrones/matrix etc, and all LOCAL, no remote API, no HTTP (though optionally we provide HTTP capabilities for the routing engines). We really do aim to replace ESRI's network analyst in QGIS mid-term, though location/allocation features will be fairly slow for now as that is currently implemented in python (which we'll release as a PyPI packages as well). If there's enough traction we'd contract someone for proper c++ metaheuristic solvers, that's above our heads. For everything we need a performant routing engine, so we have to include several third-party FOSS projects for routing & solving, those dependencies are unfortunately all binary. So after the (hopefully encouraging) announcement, my question:
I know it's strongly discouraged to submit binary components to the official plugin store. Also that wouldn't make much sense, some of those dependencies weigh like 30 MB or more (per platform). Can someone point us to a plugin that has a similar logic of pulling binary libs? I'd like to avoid to leave it to the user to install those dependencies, rather have it done automatically.
Are there other recommendations to handle this situation? I guess at the very least the user should agree to download those binaries. Since we have to download 4 different libraries, do you think the user should consent to each one individually (the routing engines are crucial, but location/allocation & VRP not really)?
Really, really excited to see how this turns out!!:) ETA is end of 2021 (so really early/mid-2022 probably;)).
All the best Nils _______________________________________________ QGIS-Developer mailing list QGIS-Developer@lists.osgeo.org List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
