QGIS 3.0 future plans

If you follow the QGIS developer mailing list, you’ve probably seen threads about the next major release: 3.0. The topic has been one of the many points we talked about at the latest QGIS developer meeting and Tim Sutton sums up the discussed plan in a post published today:

One hot topic was ‘when will QGIS 3.0 be released’. The short answer to that question is that ‘we don’t know’ – Jürgen Fischer and Matthias Kuhn are still investigating our options and once they have had enough time to understand the implications of upgrading to Qt5, Python 3 etc. they will make some recommendations. I can tell you that we agreed to announce clearly and long in advance (e.g. 1 year) the roadmap to moving to QGIS 3.0 so that plugin builders and others who are using QGIS libraries for building third party apps will have enough time to be ready for the transition. At the moment it is still uncertain if there even is a pressing need to make the transition, so we are going to hang back and wait for Jürgen & Matthias’ feedback.

The take-away message here is that the QGIS team is aware of the current developments around Python and Qt and will keep the community updated about the further development path well before any move.