Calling for new contributors

[adrien-berchet]

Dear GeoAlchemy2 community,
The main developers of this library no longer work into the GIS world, so it's hard for them to find the time to contribute to this library. But there are still some improvements that would be nice to have. That's why I am looking for new contributors to help answer issues, fix bugs and add new features.
If anyone is interested, please answer here :-)

[krisHans3n]

@adrien-berchet I'd be happy to help where I can with feature developments, in particular the MySQL (#318 ) support issue. As far as I can tell only PostgreSQL/PositGIS is supported. I know the original version of Geoalchemy has support for it and the version of SQLAlchemy (8.0) has MySQL support. I just think it would be handy to have since MySQL has good spatial capability. Do you or anybody else know if there is a particular reason why MySQL was excluded from Geoalchemy2 and why PostgreSQL was the main focus?

[adrien-berchet]

Hi @krisHans3n !
Thank you for your answer, it would be super nice to have you working on MySQL support!
For now GeoAlchemy2 supports two spatial DB: PostgreSQL / PostGIS and SQLite / SpatiaLite. I don't know the historical reasons why the initial development focused on PostGIS, maybe because the initial authors needed only this and could not take time to support all DB. But I don't think there is any technical reason.
If you want to work on this we can speak about it in #318 and you can try to start from my old attempt in #330 (I could not take more time on this and the branch is quite old now so you will have to rebase it).
See you soon and welcome aboard ;-)

[NoharaMasato]

Hello, @adrien-berchet
I'd like to contribute here if possible. Do you have any help-wanted or good-first issues?
Thank you for maintaining geoalchemy.

[adrien-berchet]

Hi @NoharaMasato
Thank you very much for proposing your help!
I have several improvements in mind:

1. I just created 2 new issues that I have in mind for some time: Rorganize dialect-specific code #395 and Associate spatial functions to each type #396. If you want to try one of them it would be nice.
2. You can also give a try to Support for MySQL spatial queries #318 since I haven't heard from @krisHans3n anymore (though it would be better to work on Rorganize dialect-specific code #395 first).
3. You can work on inserting raster directly from an array instead of using the external raster2pgsql binary (see details in How to insert raster data from an array? #87).
4. If you have any other improvement in mind we can discuss it of course.

Please let me know what you prefer so we don't work on the same things.
And don't hesitate to ask me if you need any help to start :-)

[NoharaMasato]

@adrien-berchet Thank you listing the new features and issues.
Then, I'll start from #395 .

[adrien-berchet]

Cool, thank you very much @NoharaMasato !

[papacodebear]

@adrien-berchet I'm interested in contributing if I can. Let me know if there's anywhere in particular you're looking for support.

[adrien-berchet]

Hi @papacodebear , thanks for offering to help!
I think a good first contribution would be to solve #396. Would that be ok for you?

[papacodebear]

That works great for me. I'll dig into it @adrien-berchet

[adrien-berchet]

Great, thanks! Don't hesitate to ask for help if you need.

[jjgarrett0]

I'd like to contribute if possible.

[adrien-berchet]

Hi @jjgarrett0
Thanks for offering to help! I think it would be nice to work on #401 and #436 if you can. If you are not familiar with SQLAlchemy the second one might be hard...
Please keep me informed on what you want to work to avoid duplicate work. And don't hesitate to call for help.
Thanks again!

[jjgarrett0]

@adrien-berchet I can take a crack at #401.

[adrien-berchet]

@adrien-berchet I can take a crack at #401.

Ok, nice, thanks!