[QGIS-Developer] Do we really need experimental and non-experimental plugins?

[Borys Jurgiel]

Hi Lists,

Before I make a QEP I'd like to know your general thoughts.

After I removed the deprecated plugins filter from the Plugin manager (and 
make them always visible) [1], Alex suggested doing the same with the 
Experimental status.

Initially it was designed for two cases: to mark a whole plugin as 
experimental, and to just mark the recent version (so a kind of beta). Both 
cases seem to be popular among authors: at the moment we have 215 plugins for 
master, from which ~40 are experimental only and ~20 are in both versions.

However, I'm not sure if it makes much sense nowadays. Releasing 'stable' and 
'experimental' versions seems a bit overscaled to me. And there is a simpler 
solution: If the recent version is buggy, users can just download the last 
working one from the repo and install from zip. The former case, when the 
whole plugin is experimental, seems to be often misused: authors can use it to 
hide some specialised of localised plugisn from majority of users. In fact 
even I committed such clear misuse, marking the Plugin Reloader as 
experimental just to not clutter the list for normal users... Another reason 
could be a shyness. But again, we have the rating stars now and don't need to 
rely on the author's shyness anymore.

So... Do you see important reasons to keep this tag? Maybe we should 
completely drop it? Or just remove the option to hide them from manager, 
leaving the flask icon on the plugin details page?

Regards,
Borys

[1] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/7713