[Qgis-developer] Way forward: QGIS plugin repo, plugin Trac etc.

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Alex

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 12:44 AM, Alex Mandel
<tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
>
> I feel that a central option would help new plugin authors and authors
> who want collaborate on plugins. I've created a sourceforge site for my
> plugins in the past and attracted zero developers and only had a handful
> of bugs put into my trac. Aside from that, a central place lets us
> easily adopt abandoned plugins, and to give 1 place for reporting bugs
> which in theory would improve the reporting and tracking of fixes.
>
> I don't think we have to host it, but if we don't I would like to see us
> pick one of the 3rd party hosting services and create a collaborative
> collective under which people list their plugins(a qgis group).

Picking a 3rd party hosting service seems like an option. Anyway there
were such motions before, but did not really succeed:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qgiscommunitypl/


> A large number of plugins right now aren't even under version control
> and even fewer of them have public tickets systems. So when I go to hack
> on a plugin(that isn't mine) I never know if I have the latest code or
> if it's been fixed and I don't expect an update to the release for every
> little fix. I also have no idea if it's still under development, or
> abandoned in favor of something else, merged into another plugin, etc.

I just have the impression that the plugin developers mostly will not
use that service. As you say, lots of plugins don't have any
versioning system (or just a private one) and maybe that's because the
authors do not need it for their work - more than 90% of the plugins
are one-man shows.

In the new plugin repository we would like to keep track of plugin
updates - so determining whether the plugin is dead should be simple.

Regards
Martin