Hi Geany Developers,
I've recently begun packaging the whole set of Geany plugins for Ubuntu (and will be working on it for Debian soon), and Enrico Tröger has mentioned before that he'd like to see the whole set of plugins packaged as one instead of separately, as it is currently. I, too, think it's a good idea to do something like that. However, for that to be done, I'll need the whole geany-plugins tarball released together at once. This has several implications: * Synchronizing the plugins' releases. * There must be a build system capable of building the plugins together as well as separately.
The first, I'll have to leave to the plugin developers to discuss among themselves.
For the second issue, I've noticed that there has been discussion about this before. In that thread, there were two main issues: * large and hard to maintain configure.in file * po/ is required to be in the top level directory by intltool.
For the first issue, I have a solution. Autotools allows you to pass -I<include directory> to aclocal. This can be seen in Banshee[1]'s autogen.sh. This allows you to factor out all the plugin-specific checks into plugin/build/m4/<stuff>.m4 as individual m4 macros, and have one macro per plugin that calls all the plugin-specific checks. This can then be called in the top-level configure.in, as well as each plugin's configure.in.
For the second issue, I think maintaining the plugins' independence is possible if the translations from all plugins are merged into the top-level po/ directory by autogen.sh. This would mean that if the plugins' are built together, GETTEXT_PACKAGE="geany-plugins", whereas if they are built separately, GETTEXT_PACKAGE="$pluginname". Whether or not they are built together would be left up to the user.
That said, I hope to hear positive responses about this matter. =)
Thank you for your time.
[1] http://git.gnome.org/cgit/banshee/tree/autogen.sh