[GRASS-dev] Fwd: Re: Upcoming 7.2.0: review which addons to move to core

[Blumentrath, Stefan]

Ahhh, yes, there was that branch of the discussion too...

g.extension is great and I do not see any limit with that, esp. not for single user environments.

However, on our server I download, compile and install centrally all addons from source using a script.
Thus, the main perceivable difference between core modules and addons would be visibility in the GUI...

For me personally, that is no issue. But people who start with GRASS likely often explore GRASS "graphically", thus a toolbox-approach would be very nice I think. Having an "Addons" entry in the menu (if there is space for that) where all installed addons register, would be a demonstration of existing addional functionality...
However, as you can imagine manually editing xml files for the numerous addons is no option for me. If it would be possible to implement your suggestion to add modules automatically to the GUI at install by means of Makefile (instead of g.extension) that would be splendid. But maybe I could change my script to use g.extension -s...

Advantages I see for moving addons to core:
- GRASS offers more "popular" functionality out of the box (new users probably do not check addons immediately when starting with GRASS)
- usually functionality is maintained to new major version (even if probably some exceptions exist, e.g. orthorectification GUI which has not been ported to G7 yet)
- moving an addon to core can be a kind of "award" or "reward" for an addon developer, thus it might be an incentive to e.g. add tests, documentation ...
- it might also help to motivate / involve more devs to contribute to core development?

Cheers
Stefan


-----Original Message-----
From: Moritz Lennert [mailto:mlennert at club.worldonline.be] 
Sent: 7. oktober 2016 11:00
To: Blumentrath, Stefan <Stefan.Blumentrath at nina.no>; Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com>; Anna Petrášová <kratochanna at gmail.com>
Cc: GRASS developers list <grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org>; Markus Metz <markus.metz.giswork at gmail.com>
Subject: RE: [GRASS-dev] Fwd: Re: Upcoming 7.2.0: review which addons to move to core



Le 7 octobre 2016 10:41:50 GMT+02:00, "Blumentrath, Stefan" <Stefan.Blumentrath at nina.no> a écrit :
>Hi again,
>
>Interesting discussion!
>
>With my user and amateur addon-developer perspective I would conclude
>that:
[...]
>And finally, Martins request regarding an RFC for "promoting modules to 
>core" should not drown in the discussion about unittests (even if the 
>latter probably is a precondition to the former)...

And what is your take on the actual need to move modules to core ? Why is it an advantage ? And as a corollary to that: what limits/issues do you see with g.extension ?

Moritz