Requirements

This section is a list of both hard and soft requirements (aka suggestions).

Hard requirements

Hard requirements you can’t really live without. The plugin may work but you may have real problems to make it work. The two basic hard requirements are about QGIS and PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

QGIS

Recent versions of the plugin were tested with QGIS 2.8. It is worth mentioning that plugin versions < 0.2 were developed for older versions of QGIS, which may incidentally ship with older versions of spatialite/SQlite. As of version 0.2 (Aug 2015), spatialite version 4.x is supported by the plugin. This in turn makes any QGIS versions that come with older spatialite versions unusable with the plugin (for SL checkouts at least).

Another key dependency of the plugin is ogr2ogr. Although the plugin does not depend on the most recent features of ogr2ogr, it is wise to stick to the version bundled in QGIS 2.8+ (plus because newer versions should be backwards compatible).

PostgreSQL/PostGIS

The plugin should work on any minor revision of the PostgreSQL 9.x series. It was tested successfully on PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.4.

There are no hard requirements on PostGIS as such on the part of the plugin. Packing the most recent version supported in your PostgreSQL installation should be sufficient.

Naming conventions

Operation of the plugin is best ensured by sticking to the PostgreSQL naming rules. As suggested here :

PostgreSQL uses a single data type to define all object names: the name type. A value of type name is a string of 63 or fewer characters. A name must start with a letter or an underscore; the rest of the string can contain letters, digits, and underscores.

Warning

Do NOT use empty spaces in any identifier the plugin asks you to supply

Even though PostgreSQL object names can contain capital letters, the plugin does not currently support object names other than in lowercase letters (plus digits and underscores as mentioned above). Even though the plugin ensures some level of protection in that respect, it is best to stick to those conventions when naming a new PG checkout (see later for an explanation), a branch or any other name the plugin asks you to provide.

The same applies to spatialite filenames (SL checkout).

Soft requirements

Soft requirements are more like “best practice” suggestions. As the saying goes : Your Mileage May Vary.

Separate schema

As will be explained in more detail later in this document, the qgis-versioning plugin operates “historization” by adding columns to each table in a particular database together with a revisions table that holds all revision information. For a number of reasons, it is wise to isolate your geographic data in a schema other than the public schema.

As mentioned here :

”... store no data in the ‘public’ schema.”

The specific context of the previous quote pertains to backup and restore procedures but the advice also applies for the qgis-versioning plugin.