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

Frank Lanitz frank at xxxxx
Wed Jun 3 21:24:28 UTC 2009


Hi, 

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009 20:02:07 +0200
Enrico Tröger <enrico.troeger at uvena.de> 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.

I'd like to keep this way. Reasons for:
A plugin like geanyLaTeX is only needed by a very low number of people
(unfortunately) around on the one hand, on the other hand its using some
memory and needs to be distributed with other maybe needed plugins. A
plugin like geanyLua is depending on Lua, which is quiet popular but
not as popular as everybody got Lua installed or is using it at all.
These are only two plugins which might cause trouble since availability
would be left to the plugin management (how every this will be
organised in future) and package maintainer in case of all plguins were
joined since they are the persons which are deciding which items will
make there way into the big package and which compiling options are
used and of course which dependencies will the package have. 
So either some plugins are not distributed even they are in the
project might causing bug reports etc by unsatisfied users or the
package will gets too big. 
Just to show what I mean: I've got all plugins installed from geany main
distribution as well as from the geany-plugins project - 18 if wc is
counting correct - which takes about 2MB only for the *.so files on my
AMD64 Debian/Linux system. The translation files for German language
takes about 40KB at the moment. I know its all not this much on modern
systems, but when I have a look onto the plugin wish list I'm getting a
feeling this values will increase by factor 10 soon.

Please don't take me wrong. I like the current way to build all plugins
together and like to see this improved by e.g. the already mentioned
merging features for translation but I'd like to keep the decision up
to the user. Also I don't care much whether autotools or waf or cmake
or smake or whatever is used for (even though waf is most sympatic to
me at the moment) as long as it just works. Also I agree that this can
be used by distributions as e.g. done with the pidgin plugins or other
*-plugins packages - but this is up to the packagers and should be
discussed on Debian-/Ubuntu-/openSUSE-/Fedora-/Gentoo-/*BSD-/-project. 

As a conclusion I pretty much vote for:
- leaving plugins independent 
- Improving the build system of plugins (maybe providing some good
template - feature request for geanyprj?;) )
- Improving the build system for a geany-plugins release to support a
regular snapshot release as well as supporting the merging of po files.

Cheers, 
Frank
-- 
http://frank.uvena.de/en/
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