[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 22/02/2011 23:39, Thomas Martitz a écrit :
>>> I didn't mean to say I would like to do work on someone else's plugin
>>> (as in new features). Just fix the most immediate problems. If the fix
>>> not a few-liner or no brainer I wouldn't bother with it any further
>>> anyway (but instead just disable the plugin for the time being).
>> I understand your purpose, but I doubt that such a policy would please
>> anyone.
>> Yes, I agree that IF the people that commit those fixes you talk about
>> are only the ones that are competent to do so, it'd be acceptable IMHO.
>> But with such policy it's likely that at some point somebody will feel
>> too confident and "fix" somebody else's code wrongly. And there will be
>> the drama, the hard feelings and the collapsing of the whole project --
>> I know, it's a pessimistic POV :D
>>
> 
> Yes, very pessimistic. I'm a bit more optimistic and have trust that
> people can at least consider their competence before touching and
> committing to foreign code.
One might say it's only an optimistic POV ;)

> And even then, code changes can always be undone.
That's true. Thanks to VCS :)

> Perhaps I'm just biased by how slow things are currently going in the
> Geany core, where more collaboration (by more people) would help a lot
> (I even think it reached a dangerous level of standstill).
I can't disagree with this... but if maintainers have less time to work,
I can't really blame them. As I said in a previous mail, IMHO the
maintainers are quite responsible of how the project works; so I easily
understand that they don't want to give commit access to somebody they
don't trust.
Though, perhaps they might think a little about it and see if there is
some people that would be acceptable (I think of Lex in the first place,
though I can't tell he's interested).
But this is another discussion.

> But I always think the more people the merrier.
That's generally true, assuming these people are smart enough to know
their own capabilities.

> Currently every plugin author does
> his own thing with their plugins and communicate very little about it.
> 
> I'd like it better if each plugin had a main maintainer and everyone
> else would be a co-maintainer. Now we have one and only one person
> working on each.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not against it. Why not. Actually, as far as
everything goes right, I'm happy with your proposal. But I also fear
what can happen if we don't explicitly ask the author.

A idea might simply be to ask every plugin author (and keep a list of
their answer not to have to ask again and again) if they are OK with
other people maintaining/developing/fixing/whatevering it. Perhaps even
stricter, who they allow to work on their plugin.
I guess this would be a good compromise, and would avoid hard feelings
since its the author that chooses.

Regards,
Colomban