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

[Martin Isenburg]

Hu,

Having just added a new plugin [1] today marked "experimental" my
expectation was that I would use this "experimental" flag for my first one
or two or three versions until I am sure it works for others as well and
until all the initial kinks of a first time plugin submission are ironed
out. I had the expectation that it would signal to the users that this is a
new effort and that it may take a few more updates to find and fix all the
bugs. Since doing this initial experimental release this afternoon, for
example, I've created already a newer version that I was intending to
submit soon.

Hence maybe a two week time limit for plugins to remain experimental would
be a useful way to limit the number of experimental plugins to those newly
submitted or currently under active development and kick out those that are
idle in their experimental status.

Regards from Zanzibar,

Martin

[1] http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/LAStools/



On Sun, Aug 26, 2018, 21:11 Borys Jurgiel <lists at borysjurgiel.pl> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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