[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Frank Lanitz]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:40:09 +0100
Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:

> Le 22/02/2011 20:04, Thomas Martitz a écrit :
> > 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?
> > 
> > I think all plugin developers should get more easy about others
> > touching there code. 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).
> I don't think that touching other one's code without her agreement is
> a good idea. There are several reasons for this that comes to mind:
> * some people will find this offensive (e.g. "you can't even code
> right and you won't even understand if I tell you");
> * some people will find it cool, but won't necessarily try to
> understand any further (heh, it's already fixed), so would likely
> reproduce mistakes later;
> * and unfortunately, some people might change things with not enough
> care or understanding and break other things -- this is easier than we
> might think...
> * and some people would not feel confident of somebody else commit --
> and this would probably be my case if it's somebody I hardly know.

Well, I'm afraid this might all can happen. But call me green I don't
think this will happen too often and cannot be solved in case of it
does happen and ppl like to talk to each other. If somebody who is
submitting a patch keeps in mind that he is not the main author. On the
other hand ... I don't know. All these point do make me unsure. 

> And AFAICT, people who would need help are generally likely to accept
> it when proposed (probably more than if it was imposed).

Everything based on how you offer help I guess.

> > 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".
> I doubt. This would need to run plugins in a separate process, and
> then doing some IPC to communicate. Probably doable (well, AFAIK
> recent web browsers tend to do so with their plugins -- chromium,
> FF4) but probably really not easy.

And surely nothing we like to have in Geany I guess. 

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