On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 20:02 +0200, Enrico Tröger wrote:
We once said, plugins should be and keep independent so they can installed on their own and without the need to install all other plugins. Therefore, currently each plugin (those in the geany-plugins project) have an own build system, based on autotools. Additionally we have a common build system, based on waf, which one can use to build all plugins at once from SVN.
While discussing how a possible geany-plugins release could be done and what's necessary, we came across the idea of changing the above idea: give up the independence of each plugin and instead create one big project consisting of the various plugins but with only one build system. Following you'll find a list of pros and cons which instantly came to my mind as some kind of rationale.
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So, you'll see this is some kind of basic question about the future of our plugins organisation. And because this affects all further actions, I'd like to hear your feedback first before continuing the other recent thread. Thanks.
I ask especially all current plugin authors for their opinion since this affects you directly. We don't want to decide anything without and force you to anything you don't want.
Raise your voice. Thanks.
I am most definitely in favor of joining plugins together into one build system and released package. Having a separate build system always seemed unnecessary to me, and as Nicolas said, plugin authors that want to keep their software separate are certainly free to do so.
The most preferrable situation IMHO is that a user installing geany for the first time has all the plugins available -- even enabled -- the moment he starts up the editor. You can make a good argument that putting plugins and geany together is a (distribution) package maintainer's job, but certainly having a geany-plugins release together with geany releases will help a great deal with this.