[Qgis-developer] Re: Complicate the plugin situation

[Alessandro Pasotti]

2012/1/20 Denis Rouzaud <denis.rouzaud at gmail.com>:
> Hi Paolo, hi all

Hi Denis,

I'm the unlucky guy who spent a lot of time doing, undoing, redoing
the new Plugins website.

My frustration is at his top and I couldn't agree more with you, there
are a couple of issues here:

1 - specifications on py plugins are changing very often and there is
not a clear unique authoritative source of specifications for plugins,
or peharps I just couldn't find it
2 - there is no agreement on important topics, the main was if plugins
without a tracker and a public code repository and a public homepage
can be accepted on plugins.qgis.org
3 - there is not a single place for documentation
4 - I cannot do everything by myself, I'a a python-Django coder and I
try to keep updated the specifications for the application I write, I
I'm not going to do any CSS/styling work and I will not take care of
updating the CMS pages or other end-user documentatio, somebody else
has to do that
5 - the plugins website has nothing to do with Redmine instance
running on hub.qgis.org and there is no bridge between the two (except
for authentication)
6 - there is not an approval workflow for plugins: I'm not going to
approve any plugin anymore, somebody  else must do that

IMHO the main source of confusion comes from the lack of agreement on
the following topics

* all plugins *must* have a public issue (bug) tracker on  hub.qgis.org
* all plugins *must* have a SNV/GIT core repository on  hub.qgis.org
* all plugins *must* have a public homepage

after endless emails we agreed on

* all plugins should have a public issue tracker
* all plugins should should a SNV/GIT core repository
* all plugins should have a public homepage

this means that if the author doesn't supply those informations a
warning (not an error!) is issued by the plugins app. Only staff
members and authors see the warnings. The warning says:

"Some important informations are missing from the plugin metadata
(homepage, tracker or repository). Please consider creating a project
on hub.qgis.org and filling the missing metadata."

this is a suggestion, not an order, if the red color of the text
disturbs you, we can easily change, also, if you have some proposals
on a better message, please let us know.

As I wrote recently, I'm strongly against "forcing" authors to create
projects on Redmine, I myself will not do it for my plugins,
"suggesting" authors to do so, it's a good compromise: the idea is "if
you (author) dont' know where to host your code or your tracker, hub
is here to help you". If hub doesn't work as expected (and I'm pretty
sure it doesn't), please add  a comment to one of the tickets already
opened about the same sub-project issue.


The source of specifications for the plugins application which I
maintain is here:

https://github.com/qgis/qgis-django/blob/master/qgis-app/plugins/docs/introduction.rst

Also, at this time, metadata.txt is not (yet) mandatory your plugin
will be accepted even if there is only __init__.py


-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
w3:   www.itopen.it