[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Matthew Brush]

On 03/11/11 15:27, Frank Lanitz wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:41:54 -0800
> Matthew Brush<matthewbrush at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>>> 4. Removing unsupported plugins from releases
>>> what do you think about the following scheme: divide all pluging
>>> into:
>>> - "supported" (that are acting really well)
>>> - "unsupported" or "bad" (having problems) ?
>>> So, every geany-plugins release will contain several packages:
>>> "geany-plugins", "geany-plugins-bad or "geany-plugins-unsupported",
>>> something like this
>> This is like GStreamer plugins and I think it's a very good idea.
>> They could be grouped in the configure.ac file to add an option like
>> --enable-bad and --enable--unsupported or something.
> How this is going to be maintained? Somebody has to take over
> responsibility to set the flag.
>
I would be willing to perform certain checks on a few of the plugins (at 
least the ones that don't require tons of coding expertise), and if a 
few other people volunteered, it wouldn't be much of a job.  Even if 
it's not as formal as the previous discussions, just an email notifying 
the plugin author that one of these criteria is not met, just as an example:

   - Up to date documentation with the things from my last message, for 
example
   - Proper license/license file
   - Passes some checks such as 'cppcheck' being discussed on the ML.
   - Performs its purpose without dumping errors on the 
console/segfaulting/etc.

I guess just to have someone else confirm these things.  For example 
with the Devhelp plugin I wrote, I don't even really know if it 
works/installs on anyone else's computer except mine.  I'm not sure if 
anyone is using it, or anyone (besides yourself) has even tried it.  For 
all I know, everyone compiling from source could be disabling my plugin 
because of errors or something.  I would be glad to have a 2nd set of 
eyes just give it a quick once over it to make sure it's installing and 
serving its purpose as expected and the documentation isn't out of date, 
and so on, on a regular basis.

Maybe it's too much work, but it seems possible.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush (codebrainz)