[Qgis-developer] How to manage a centralized repository of plugins?

[Alex Mandel]

On 03/04/2014 07:29 AM, HAUBOURG wrote:
> Hi All,
> I'm currently installing QGIS 2.2 in my administration, and suddenly discovered an (new ?) behaviour.
> We put some "mandatory" plugins on a network drive, and every client is open with the environnement variable QGIS_PLUGINPATH to use that centralized place.
> Problem occurs when upgrading a plugin there. Default conf of the QGIS clients activates the plugins, but it seems that the installer checks if the version has changed, and if yes, deactivates the plugin.
> That means QGIS stores detailed informations about installed plugin somewhere, but I couldn't find it in .ini (or registry key). Anyone knows how it works?
> Secondly, this implies that I don't know how to manage those plugins, since they will be unloaded by default... Any idea on how to do that?
> 
> Cheers
> Régis
> 

For a centralized repo its recommended to use a webserver with an xml
file like the one described here:
http://www.qgisworkshop.org/html/workshop/repositories.html

Then you just give QGIS the url to that xml file and it handles the
detection of newer versions whenever the server gets updates.

I'm not 100% sure but qgis might not check the version of current
plugins until you open the updater tool. Maybe one of the devs can chime
in if it's stored in a file somewhere, I guarantee it's not a registry
item since thats not cross platform. List of plugins is in QGIS.conf
(location varies by OS) with a true/false for activation but not the
version of the plugins.

Thanks,
Alex