Plugin test on MacOS

[anwai98]

Hi team,

Thanks for asking me to try out your software!

Here's my experience:

• Before installing the plugin, I had to install QGIS on my Macbook (an old Mabook Air with MacOS Monterey)
• I installed the QGIS LTR via the .dmg file and the application opened successfully (plus tip: Mac does not like open-source softwares, so I had to override the security permissions, which is fine, but users should be aware of this).
• Tried installing the plugin via the zip file as the first step, the software seems to hang with two weird behaviours:
  • It opens multiple QGIS icons in the taskbar at the bottom (and this happens recursively until the system stops working).
  • It opens strange dialogue boxes with different error messages (eg. of some components missing here and there).
• The only way to get out of this is to force shutdown the Macbook and restart to stop this recursive application reopening issue.

I tried the same with another colleague's Macbook (a rather new Macbook Pro - MacOS Sequoia), and had the exact same experience.

I couldn't manage to go further from this step :(

PS. Let me know if I can help you debug this. Happy to offer help with testing stuff on my Macbook!

[maxfreu]

I suspect that these additional windows are not in fact new instances of QGIS, but subprocesses that are calling pip for package installation. Can you trace what processes are being spawned by QGIS? You could do this by either looking at the task manager (or however mac calls it) while the system is going to hell, or you fire up some script that logs all running processes to a textfile and then invoke the plugin.

The pip installation is set up to retry things 3 times before giving up.

https://github.com/GISLAB-HAWK/TrailScan-QGIS-Plugin/blob/402ab49fecfc7289f88ebc7ca7f22e40447fd93f/Trailscan/packages_installer_dialog.py#L371C1-L377C18

If QGis now fires up 10 installation processes for 10 packages and each of them fails for some reason and retries 3 times, this could saturate the system. The current code says it installs packages one by one in order to avoid conflicts. But actually, this causes the opposite: If pip does not know all packages it should install in one go, the dependency resolver cannot come up with a set of package versions that work together. In turn, the installation for the second package might uninstall the first and re-install it with another version that matches what package 2 needs and so on for the remaining packages. This increases the installation workload by quite a bit. This could be improved by installing all packages in a single pip command.

[anwai98]

Hi @maxfreu,

Ahha okay, good to know. I will check this out later today and come back to you all. The most interesting thing would be to trace back if I can figure out the root for the subprocesses running / trying to execute!

[tkempen]

unfortunately the installation still crashes QGIS on MacOS. I was not able to copy the error message, but the following notices were shown: Unable to to install numpy, user, install, pip, -m. And again, a second instance of QGIS was opened during the initial start.