On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 13:00:57 +0000, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
On Thu, 3 Jan 2008 15:28:31 -0500 "John Gabriele" jmg3000@gmail.com wrote:
Hm. To sidestep issues about licensing and also maintainability, *and* to keep the Geany core small, it would seem to me that Geany would benefit from having a plug-in manager that could download and install plug-ins.
I don't think that fits in the core of Geany, and it would be a lot of work. One major show stopper would be that on Linux you can't just install a binary plugin (or at least not with a lot of expertise) that will work across different distributions, versions of glibc, etc.
There is another problem(nowadays) with installing binaries from the net: security. On Debian, the package manager uses GPG signatures to verify you download only the official, unmodified binary packages to minimise any security risks. A security aware user shouldn't install or use any binaries which are downloaded from the net without proper verification. I'm going to do something similar with the Geany binaries for Windows in the future. They will probably signed with my certificate to ensure they weren't modified at any point.
And the alternative would be to compile plugins from source which raises a couple of new problems: * compile environment(compiler, linker, ...) * necessary libraries and their development files (GTK, GLib, any plugin specific requirements, ...) * make use of any package manager? Every distribution uses it's own with it's own package names * ...
To make a long story short, if anyone feels really bored, please go for it and write a plugin for a plugin manager of this kind. But something like this won't be in Geany's core. IMO, this is too complex, too error-prone. Of course, the advantage would be a nice user experience.
Regards, Enrico