[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Frank Lanitz]

Hi folks,

And again it happen to me that Geany did crash due some issue with a
plugin which might not have been tested very well before checking in
/committing.
However, I don't want to point with my finger to any developer so I'm
asking how we could improve overall quality of plugins inside release as
well as on trunk.

Failures I was recognizing in past did start with simple case/data type
warnings on compile time up to segfaults caused by not correct
initialized pointers as well a number of memory leaks. I know its not
possible to write 100% clean code as well as I'm aware of my code isn't
very well too. But I really like to change something here.

So my 1st suggestion is to remove all plugins which do have known issues
and don't compile with some -W-flags (needs to be defined) from common
build until these are fixed. Also remove plugins which don't bring
propper documentation as well are unmaintained for some time.

As a first shoot this could be from my point of view

- Updatechecker (crash on Windows build)
- GeanyLUA (lot of warnings on compiling time)
- Pretty Printer (lot of warnings on compiling time)
- GeanyGDB (nearly unmaintained)
- GeanyVC (de facto unmaintained)
- WebHelper (Crash mentioned on SF)

Unfortunately this is not a complete list. So maybe we could just remove
every plugin and just start to create a white list.

Ideally (from my point of view) we could set up some kind of review
process but I'm afraid it will not possible due lag of resources -
somebody needs to read and understand the code. Also we might could work
with tests for typical things - somebody only have to code them. I just
don't see any big alternatives at the moment.

What do you think about?

Thanks,
Frank