I personally hope whatever the group decides to do with the plugins doesn't involve requiring a rewrite of all of them, because we'll surely lose plugins and supporters that way.
Concerning some of your perceived shortcomings:
On 03/18/2015 10:42 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Currently geany exports a pointer to a struct, that contains more structs, which contain function points to the API functions. Fortunately this is nicely hidden to developers via macros. But due to gtkbuilder all functions and nothing prevents plugins from accessing these. And the macros are awkward and strange anyway. There is currently the linkage-cleanup PR in the works which improves this by actually exporting the API functions, and _only_ the API functions to plugins.
Maybe I'm completely wrong on this from an architecture perspective, but part of what I like about writing plugins for geany is accessibility. If we only get access to a subset of functions, then it seems less flexible what our plugins can actually do. Yes, this allows us to write bad plugins that can do some sloppy things, but I say "so what". They are plugins. Someone would have to go out of their way to install most plugins outside of geany-plugins, and there is some vetting for that list of plugins. I say by keeping the restrictions minimal on what plugins can access, we can get more powerful plugins and not block off potential plugins by our over-abstraction.
Take chrome/chromium browser, for instance. They basically have restricted all plugins to be at most a button on the toolbar or effecting web pages. There seems to be no possible way to write a plugin to get vertical tabbing I so appreciate in firefox (and geany for that matter) because chrome seems to have this stuck-up mac attitude that it's the way they intended, no customization allowed, "mission accomplished https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSQA1jqFpM". Maybe I'm wrong, maybe that's not chrome's motive, but I certainly don't like the lack of flexibility of their plugin architecture. (If anyone knows a way on linux to get vertical tabs in chrome, that would be awesome ;-)
I suppose you could argue that having access to almost everything requires more frequent updating of plugins, but personally I haven't had more than one or two line changes with any update to geany. Plus then we have to worry more about plugin support and it's own set of bugs.
That's just my opinion. Thoughts?
Thanks,
Steve