[Qgis-developer] "official" python plugins suggestions

[Martin Dobias]

Hi all,

it will be probably easier to discuss plugins for official repo here
on mailing list as I think that arranging an IRC meeting would be of
too much hassle. I suggest that these plugins should be official:

- plugin installer, mapfile export - they're already in source tree,
but should be possible to update them
- fTools
- table manager
- raster algebra
- (maybe) html image map

Some of these plugins are in other repositories (and their developers
probably prefer that), so I got the idea that official plugin
repository could work just as a "proxy". On update of a plugin,
authorized developer would just login to official repository and will
use pull function that will get the copy of plugin's archive and
metadata from the original repository. What do you think? Any other
ideas how official repo should work?

My other (and bigger) concern is about managing official repository
(and repository of other contributed plugins). Gary has written he's
going to set up official repository with limited write access and
other one, open for everyone. But I guess he's quite busy with other
things - until now I haven't seen any news about the progress.
Moreover, for future I think it's desirable that the repositories will
be managed by someone with more time. By managing I mean either doing
both changes in repository code when needed and giving permissions to
official repository. There will be surely further improvements in
plugins management and main repository should be able to react to
these needs.

We should do also some improvements to repository metadata - along
with much needed qgis_minimum_version tag there should be some more at
least, I think:
- last_update - date/time when the plugin has been recently updated
(so that one can see whether the plugin is being maintained)
- dependency - list of python modules which should be available for
execution of the plugins (e.g. R, psycopg, gdal, ogr ...)
- contact - author's email address in some spam-unfriendly format

Regards
Martin