[Qgis-developer] plugins

[Borys Jurgiel]

I asked generally about my view of clearing the model of plugin developing, 
publishing and managing.

> Ideas for managing versions you mean? Or for installing plugins
> directly from the plugin manager? For the former I'm not sure what the
> solution is 

It's the bigger trouble. Now the solution is a set of built-in workarounds, 
upgradeable with the whole Installer. After we move the Installer to 
the "permanent" plugin directory (and lose the upgradeability) I hope most of 
plugin authors will have it istalled and just see the possible errors. 
Furthermore, we can try to inform plugins developers, that from now proper 
plugin metadata will be much more important.

However, sometimes someone may not test it accurately, so some rapid response 
force will be required. I see 2 solutions:

1) The official repository admin(s) - a men to badger distracted authors 
and/or correct the repository entries. Maybe it's not so stupid as it sounds. 
I think we should divide the repository into two parts: open unofficial and 
moderated official. In this case some mechanism to estimate the quality of 
particular plugins and move them from the unofficial to the official 
repository will be needed anyway.

2) The installer should have a posibility to use a upgradeable plugin with 
workaround functions. I mean just a small upgradeable plugin only for use by 
the Installer (and even ignored by the Plugin Manager). This solution isn't 
too smart, so it would be reserved only for extreme and temporary cases.