[Qgis-developer] Plugin Dependencies

[Alessandro Pasotti]

2015-10-26 16:31 GMT+01:00 Hugo Mercier <hugo.mercier at oslandia.com>:

> Hi,
>
> Related to this problematic (and not specific to processing), should the
> future 3.0 version of QGIS be a good opportunity to review a little bit
> the plugin management system ?
>
> I am thinking of: using pip to manage plugins.
>
> This would have some advantages :
> - allow a plugin to depend on external packages and rely on pip
> implementations on the different platforms to resolve dependencies
> - this could also be used to have a plugin that depends on other plugins
> - metadata could be integrated (rather than the current custom
> metadata.txt)
> - possibly ease the deployment of plugins with binary parts (to be
> explored)
> - ease the development of plugins with Python's virtualenv (say for
> instance a stable and a "dev" virtualenv)
> - use standard tools, both on client (pip) and server (pypi) part.
>
> I am not sure yet if it would require an API break, but the version
> change could be a good opportunity for a clean up.
>
> Thoughts ?
>


Hello Hugo,

IMHO using  setuptools and pip it's a good idea, it does support download
and install from several protocols (git included) out of the box, it also
support dependencies and keywords licence tags, I'm not sure that it can
support custom tags too, but it it's not so important.

I guess that most of the times, a plugin would not even need to be hosted
by us on plugins.qgis.org but it could just be a git(hub) URI (with a big
red warning to the the users that they are installing software from an
external repository  etc. etc.).

I'm not sure about the support on other platforms, luckily (for me) I'm
deeply ignorant about other OSes but it seems that windows users often have
a lot of problems with installing and running python code: would
pip/setuptools make things easier for them?

I don't understand completely what do you mean with the other points
(virtualenvs and binary parts) can you elaborate?

-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
w3:   www.itopen.it
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