[Qgis-developer] Plugin Dependencies

[Hugo Mercier]

Hi,

Related to this problematic (and not specific to processing), should the
future 3.0 version of QGIS be a good opportunity to review a little bit
the plugin management system ?

I am thinking of: using pip to manage plugins.

This would have some advantages :
- allow a plugin to depend on external packages and rely on pip
implementations on the different platforms to resolve dependencies
- this could also be used to have a plugin that depends on other plugins
- metadata could be integrated (rather than the current custom metadata.txt)
- possibly ease the deployment of plugins with binary parts (to be explored)
- ease the development of plugins with Python's virtualenv (say for
instance a stable and a "dev" virtualenv)
- use standard tools, both on client (pip) and server (pypi) part.

I am not sure yet if it would require an API break, but the version
change could be a good opportunity for a clean up.

Thoughts ?