[OpenLayers-Dev] Addins Directory

[Erik Uzureau]

Since Señor Schmidt has been so good about carrying the new ClearBSD
license forward[1], the time has come once again to talk about the
idea of an Addins directory.

The idea behind Addins is to create a space in the OpenLayers
repository where we can put layers, controls, and other OpenLayers
related projects that don't quite belong in the core distribution of
the library, but that people might find useful.

The hope with Addins is that it will be a fertile ground for people to
show off tricks and gadgets they've built that do cool things with
OpenLayers and that they're interested to give back to the community.
Off the top of my head, a couple of specific projects seem like worthy
candidates:
 * WMS Manager (getCapabilities-enhanced layerswitcher tool)
 * Generally Improved LayerSwitcher (grouping, dragging-to-reorder)
 * Driving Directions library (code that works with OLS or pgRouting
to request and display routing information on an OpenLayers Map)

I'm sure there are many other projects that could qualify.

It is important to distinguish between the sandboxes and the Addins
directory. The former is a playground for people to experiment. The
code is not covered by any license and is indeed in a sort of
"free-for-all" state. The latter, however, will be exclusively for
established projects interested in a more formal release process. Code
in the Addins directory will be covered under the ClearBSD license,
and tags will be made for compatibility with different OL versions.

A proposed directory structure might look something like this:

/sandbox
/branches
/trunk
/trunk/openlayers
/trunk/addins
/tags/openlayers
/tags/addins

Please let me know what you think of this proposal, and if you think
you have a project that you would be interested in releasing in the
Addins directory.

Cheers, boa noite,
Erik


[1] http://trac.openlayers.org/changeset/4985