By the time a release of QGIS makes it out the door, most of us developers have long since forgotten about it and taken to the green fields of being able to add features again in QGIS trunk (i.e. ‘the fun place’). There is however a kind of sigh of relief to have made another milestone in the project and to have reduced the delta between what users want in a desktop GIS and what we provide. This (1.4) release announcement resulted in a bit of a mob rush to the QGIS website which caused quite a bit of downtime for the site over the last 24 hours. Thankfully Chris Schmidt and Frank Warmerdam (and probably others) were on hand to give the server the needed poke with a pointy stick to get it to behave better.

I decided to host the QGIS standalone installer exe on linfiniti.com for this release in order to try to get a better idea of download stats. Despite the server outages (meaning people didn’t have the link to download QGIS off my server) we have done around 900 downloads in the 24 hour period since the announcement. Considering that many people will share a download amongst friends and colleagues, especially here in South Africa where bandwidth is limited, and that there are numerous types of QGIS packages which aren’t tracked, 900 downloads probably means many times that actually installed onto people’s desktops.

QGIS 1.5 should be the final release before we start breaking API compatibility to make way for the 2.0 release. Breaking API compatibility lets use get rid of cruft from the code base and refactor the way we have designed QGIS without the overhead of having to support a large number of existing plugins and custom apps based on QGIS. I am looking forward to the rest of this year and all the new QGIS goodies the developer team will bring to the table!