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capstone-coal / pycoal

Python toolkit for characterizing Coal and Open-pit surface mining impacts on American Lands
http://capstone-coal.github.io/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Improve QGIS Install/Usage Instructions #116

Closed ghost closed 6 years ago

ghost commented 7 years ago

A version of QGIS linked against GDAL 2.2.0+ is required for correct viewing of COAL data files such as the GIS bundle. The website documents how to build QGIS from a Debian source package. It would be better to (1) see if the latest version of QGIS (currently 2.18) will work, and if not (2) provide more generic build/usage instructions.

I originally did things the Debian way in order to minimize the difference between the original and rebuilt versions on my Debian system. For some reason I was unable to build a redistributable binary with checkinstall as I did with GDAL. However, even if COAL data processing itself targets GNU/Linux, the GIS viewing should be cross-platform so that anyone can view our data products.

ghost commented 7 years ago

I probably should have filed this as a website issue.

ghost commented 7 years ago

As mentioned, the latest stable release of QGIS is 2.18. Based on the source code installation instructions in the relevant tag, this version only requires GDAL 1.4 or greater.

Thus we cannot assume that stable builds or other packaged versions will contain the necessary functionality and so a manual installation is still required.

More generic build instructions would be useful, however I am not currently in a position to test multiple systems. Thus my current recommendation is to maintain the Debian instructions for the time being. However, I will leave this issue open for future improvement.

lewismc commented 7 years ago

This also relates to the Docker build I put together. I was derailed somewhat by the REST API work. I will try to get back around to it @browtayl thank you for logging the issue.

ghost commented 7 years ago

This is also something that COAL-FO students might be able to take care of... after all of their writing assignments are out of the way.

Although pycoal targets GNU/Linux, it would be best if data products could be viewed on any platform supported by GDAL+QGIS. Our website does reference the generic INSTALL instructions which are suitable for a manual build on any system, and the Debian instructions are probably very similar to any other system, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out. It just takes a while to compile.

bdegley4789 commented 6 years ago

I would be willing to take a shot at solving this issue, I'll assign myself to this issue, assuming it still hasn't been solved. Let me know if there are any updates on this issue I should be aware of Thanks

lewismc commented 6 years ago

@bdegley4789 ni updates, please go ahead, Thanks

ghost commented 6 years ago

Thanks folks for investigating this issue, I wanted to share minor feedback that I hope will be helpful. Based on the video that was linked on the mailing list, the modifications to the installation instructions may not be completely correct. It has always been possible to install the official versions of GDAL and QGIS, but the admittedly complex installation procedure was necessary to integrate the patch for rotating AVIRIS files correctly. In the demo from 7:07 to 9:57 the flightline is displayed north to south when in fact it should be rotated as pictured in the conference poster. This is actually very helpful because it confirms that the patch frustratingly still hasn't made it into the latest release, something I didn't have time to verify. Until it has, however, the original installation instructions are probably more accurate and it is misleading to discourage manual compilation.

lewismc commented 6 years ago

Hi Taylor, thanks for commenting. Honestly, we are going to be discussing he video his comignThursday so your comments are very timely. As you can see from the video, it looks like GDAL has not been installed correctly as there is a large ugly looking program trace which should not be present... this would indicate to me that the GDAL program is not installed correctly. We will be revisiting this coming Thursday...

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 17:15 Taylor Alexander Brown < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Reopened #116 https://github.com/capstone-coal/pycoal/issues/116.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/capstone-coal/pycoal/issues/116#event-1495732065, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABHJl5JRgPNzxW1VkmSvQ4WoKkf0UeE4ks5tZKijgaJpZM4ORmsZ .

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ghost commented 6 years ago

I noticed the trace in the video but can't suggest an explanation without trying to reproduce it. It's entirely possible that a bug or regression was found, either in our code or GDAL's, in which case it is in everyone's interest to get it resolved. There are a lot more moving pieces to worry about now that the command line interface (which is looking great, by the way) and build automation stuff is moving forward. The issue with the example scripts might have been related since they expect the pycoal module to be known to the Python system. Running the tests is probably the most straightforward way of verifying that everything is configured as expected.

However, getting back to this issue, I agree that verifying the installation procedure and vetting both the old and new documentation is probably the best place to start. As soon as QGIS makes a suitable release the manual compilation will not be necessary, although it still might be useful in some cases. Just as a reminder, there is a handy bundle of GIS data ready to use that is documented on the blog which comes preconfigured with a lot of useful data. However you and the COAL-FO team will want to decide whether data visualization or data processing is a higher priority at this point.

Thanks for the update and best of luck to everyone with the ongoing development and coursework. Having more sets of eyes on the codebase is always valuable for stimulating progress. Although the documentation is intended to be comprehensive, a lot of information is still implicit in the COAL community so reaching out about issues that come up is not a bad idea. The original project would not have succeeded without the feedback we received from other free software developers.

ghost commented 6 years ago

P.S., for development purposes it is often more convenient to load the pycoal module using sys.path.append rather than installing it globally.

ghost commented 6 years ago

Since I misfiled this issue in the first place, I think the best thing to do is to close it and file a new one with the website issues but maybe leave it on the back-burner until QGIS gets its act together. I'm going to revert commit 4504f67 but feel free to make a case to revert the revert or better yet build on it. It was good to get some concrete evidence that QGIS is still out of date, so thanks to everyone for looking into this.