[Geany-Devel] Geany-Plugins rework -- RFC

[Frank Lanitz]

Hi folks,

Since a few releases I'm experiencing some not optimal way of
development which is surely caused by the long history we already have
on g-p as well as by the many people around luckily contributing to the
plugins collection: More and more plugins are going into some kind of an
orphaned state. There is some maintainer available but not really
responsive e.g. due to workload at reallife etc. However, at the end
some of the plugins are still compiling but not effectively working any
more with recent Geany version or its documentation is really outdated
-- when I was preparing the commits for waf removing I have seen plugins
still depending on Geany 0.16 ... I'm pretty sure, if they would, they
would compile any more ;)

Also the documentation of each plugin are differing in style, size and
quality much. (and I have to include the plugins I'm maintaining here
100% too). At github we already got a bunch of bug reports and pull
requests for plugins waiting for any response. Also there is a long
backlog at sf I've been told.

This is what I was thinking of to improve the situation (the overall
experience for our users)

1) Deactivating all plugins / out comment all plugins from MAINTAINERS
2) Cleaning off NEWS, Changelog etc. from individual plugin folders
3) Moving documentation of all plugins into a structure like
   doc/<pluginname> to get a real fitting (online) manual. At this
   point update documentation and bring them to some markup stil (Rest?
   md? Docbook? I don't care at this point)
4) Moving all plugins into a subfolder like plugins/<pluginname> to
   clean up / of g-p a little
5) Reactivating plugins by a pull request of the actual (old|new)
   maintainer maybe doing steps 2-4 and comment back in the plugin in
   MAINTAINERS. Also I would be happy if at this point po/POTFILES.in
   is reviewed etc.
6) Release a cleaned up g-p
7) Post 1.27 puring not update plugins from src tree

What do you think about this idea? I would combine this with some
release goals like complete support of Geany Gtk3 stack (if applicable).

Timeschedule: 1-4 until Xmas 2015, 5-6 until March.

Cheers,
Frank



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