[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Frank Lanitz]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:04:17 +0100
Thomas Martitz <thomas.martitz at student.htw-berlin.de> wrote:

> Am 22.02.2011 19:36, schrieb Colomban Wendling:
> 
> >> 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.
> > Well... I'm puzzled. Disabling unperfect plugins is a good idea in
> > theory for the stability of Geany, but... how would be plugins
> > tested then?
> >
> > However, I agree with making official builds with strong error
> > checking enabled (at least -Werror-implicit-function-declaration
> > comes directly to my mind). This is static checking that will show
> > most obvious problems, and hopefully it'll encourage their
> > maintainer to fix them. However, finding the right flags will not
> > be easy... for example not allowing any implicit cast may have a
> > false-positive effect where unexperimented developers might hide a
> > part of those with a cast where a proper fix would be better.
> 
> I agree. While we may know they have known problems, how would we
> know in the future if they're disabled and receive no testing?

Yes, this is a problem we would need to solve. But it seems to me it
might not be a good idea to play some fundamentalistic disabling of
plugins. 

> I think all plugin developers should get more easy about others
> touching there code. 

Puh. This is a hard point as it might end up in some bad discussion
about direction of development. But well... I think there will be a
solution if some issue like this is popping up. 

> I could probably fix a number of problems in
> other people's plugins, but I'm afraid of the surrounded discussion
> (post or pre commit).

Wellll. I guess there was only one case I dissmissed a patch (and I'm
sorry for this) in past. At least I'm always happy if somebody is
finding and fixing some issues. 

> What I also wonder; is there a way to prevent plugins from crashing 
> geany entirely? I'd rather have a notice "Oops, Plugin Foo crashed".

freeing a document pointer will always crash Geany unless you put
plugins into some kind of virtual machine ... and I don't think its
what we want to do. 

Cheers, 
Frank 
-- 
http://frank.uvena.de/en/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.geany.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20110222/ccfc07c4/attachment.pgp>