[Geany-devel] Merging of Geany Plugins

[Chow Loong Jin]

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
-- 
Regards,
Chow Loong Jin
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