v1.6 — every symbol QGIS can draw

The QGIS round trip, closed

Styling has travelled between QGIS and GeoDeploy since v1.4, for the symbology GeoDeploy itself
has. This release is about everything else QGIS draws — and about being honest where a web map
cannot follow. All of it is measured against real PyQGIS on both QGIS 3.44 LTR and QGIS 4.2, in
CI, on every commit: 349 regression checks and 531 more generated from QGIS's own symbol and
renderer registries.

• Rule-based rendering. A rule tree becomes one render layer per rule, each with its filter,
  its symbol and its own scale range, and comes back as a rule tree. This is the one most real QGIS
  projects reach for, and it used to arrive as a single flat symbol.
• A symbol is everything it stacks. A casing under a road, a dashed overlay on a solid line, a
  hatch: QGIS builds these by stacking simple lines in one symbol, and only the first was read. A
  rule's symbol stacks the same way — that half was missing for longer, so a red line under blue
  dashes published as plain red inside a rule while publishing correctly outside one.
• Markers along a line, with their spacing — arrows on a river, ticks on a boundary, circles on
  a route. The spacing used to travel as a number without its unit, so 20 screen pixels came back
  as 15 millimetres and the markers landed three times too far apart, which reads as "they are
  missing".
• Hatch and pattern fills, gradients, line offsets, 2.5D, centroid fills, heatmaps, arrow lines,
  blend modes — each either travels or is reported as approximated.
• A class carries its own symbol, not only its colour. A categorized layer whose classes differ
  by dash, width or marker shape is drawn that way on both sides.
• Anything GeoDeploy has no words for travels as a picture. An SVG marker, a font marker, a
  hatch, a multi-layer symbol — QGIS renders it, and the portal draws the thing you drew. A style
  embedded in a file only names a path to an SVG on the machine that wrote it, which is of no use
  anywhere else. Sizes survive the trip: QGIS sizes a raster marker by its canvas, not its ink.
• Labels are symbology too. Label rule trees (water blue at 9pt, a town brown at 11), the text
  expression, halo, letter spacing, capitalisation, offset, priority, per-label scale ranges, and
  where the text sits — at a point, or bent along the line, on it or above it.

Labels drawn once

• A big polygon no longer carries its name in a grid across itself. MapLibre places a symbol per
  geometry as the tile delivers it, and tiles clip — so a polygon crossing four tiles was four
  geometries, each getting the label. No style property can say otherwise. Labels for polygons are
  now drawn from a point source (ST_PointOnSurface, so the label is inside the shape — a
  centroid falls in the hole of a ring and puts a country's name in the sea).
• "Label every part of a multi-part feature" is an option now, off by default, as it is in QGIS.
  An archipelago wants it; a country with two islands does not.

External sources — every kind a web map can draw

xyz | wms | wfs becomes xyz | wms | wmts | wfs | ogcapi | vectortile | pmtiles, from the web
UI, the CLI and the QGIS plugin alike.

• OGC API - Features: paste the landing page, the collection, or the items URL — all three work.
• Third-party vector tiles: a .pbf template or its TileJSON.
• PMTiles: a remote archive read a tile at a time by your instance, so the whole file is never
  downloaded, the portal needs no PMTiles library, and the provider needs no CORS policy.
• WMTS as its own kind, rather than being sent as a WMS to a server that only speaks GetTile.
• Everything that can be validated is validated when you add it — a WFS and an OGC API
  collection are fetched, a TileJSON is read, a PMTiles header is parsed. That is where a wrong
  layer name or an unreachable host surfaces, and where the layer inside a tile set, its zoom range
  and its extent come from.
• What is read as data is proxied same-origin. A raster tile is fetched the way the web has
  fetched images for twenty years; GeoJSON, a vector tile and a PMTiles byte range are cross-origin
  requests, and a provider without Access-Control-Allow-Origin breaks those silently — an empty
  layer and a console error a visitor never sees.
• WCS is deliberately not a kind, and says so: GetCoverage returns a coverage, not map images,
  so there is nothing a web map can draw from it. Most WCS servers publish the same data over WMS.

Without a token, the plugin now sees what it should

• A published public portal opens the same with or without an account — same colours, rules,
  labels and folders. There used to be two implementations of "what does this portal look like":
  the authored styling for a signed-in user, and a backwards translation of the published
  MapLibre paint for everyone else. The reverse is lossy by construction, so every symbology fix
  landed on one side and the anonymous path drifted further behind with each release.
  GET /api/public/portals/{slug} serves the authored configuration to anybody — the same map
  style.json already publishes as paint, in the vocabulary it was written in.
• A public layer added on its own arrives styled. The anonymous index is deliberately the
  smallest view of an instance and carries no default_style; nothing had ever asked for the
  detail that does.

In the browser

• Delete several layers at once. Checkboxes in My Data, a select-all per section over what the
  filter shows, and one Delete. The confirmation lists every item by name and the union of the
  portals they appear in; deletions run one at a time (each prunes portals and re-publishes them),
  and one failure is skipped with its reason rather than abandoning the rest.
• "No basemap" is a choice everywhere a map is drawn, on a white ground rather than a black one.
• Changing the basemap changes the basemap and nothing else. It used to be able to hide one of
  the portal's own layers.
• Zoom to layer works on a phone. Five call sites padded the fit by the sidebar's full width;
  on a phone that panel is 85vw, so the padding exceeded the canvas and MapLibre silently declined
  to move — a button that did nothing, with nothing in any log. Touch targets grew from 22px to
  34px on coarse pointers, and a folder's zoom no longer hides behind hover.
• A control flyout fits the screen it opens on. The basemap list ran off the bottom of a
  landscape window with eight entries, and "None" could not be reached.

Uploads and ingest

• Every layer of a multi-layer GeoPackage is ingested, including one with no styling saved and
  one whose name collides after truncation.
• A zipped GeoPackage, FileGDB or shapefile set is unpacked and read.

Fixes worth naming

• A raster no longer draws unstretched (usually blank) when its style could not be read; the
  portal keeps what it had rather than having it replaced with nothing.
• A rate-limited upload waits and retries instead of failing a group push half way, so pushing a
  portal no longer has to be done twice.
• A stale geodeploy module no longer stops the QGIS plugin connecting after an in-place upgrade.

For operators

Nothing to do. The new tile function and the four new external_sources columns are applied on
start, and Martin's configuration is rebuilt with them. Published portals are unchanged until you
re-publish; a portal re-published on this version gains the label-point source for its polygons.