[Geany-devel] Restructuring the Geany-plugins project?

[Bert Vermeulen]

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.
[...]
> 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.


-- 
Bert Vermeulen
bert at biot.com