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

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi all,


On 08/27/2018 02:06 AM, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 04:11, 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.
> I'm -1 on this. Experimental plugins can be dangerous (some result in
> crashes, data corruption, etc), and shouldn't be shown by default.
I agree with Nyall. Furthermore, I'm also -1 on showing deprecated
plugins. These are mosty useless, sometimes dangerous. I ask to revert
the change ASAP.
>> 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.
> I think that's overestimating some of our user's abilities -- it would
> take a lot of knowledge that:
> 1. a plugin is at fault
> 2. they can overwrite a plugin manually with an earlier version
> and
> 3. they can download earlier versions of plugins.
>
> Then, they'd also need to know *which* older plugin version is "good"
> and should be downloaded.
Agreed fully.
> I think it should be kept. I know of one buggy plugin which recently
> got marked as experimental, and I'm *very* glad to see this particular
> plugin hidden from the majority of our users by default.
Again, agreed.
All the best.

-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html
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