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

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi Borys,

Personally, I think there is a need for the differentiation of 
experimental or not experimental.

I'd like to keep it as it is.

Andreas


Am 27.08.2018 um 02:06 schrieb Nyall Dawson:
> 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.
>
>> 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.
>
>> 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?
> 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.
>
> Nyall
> _______________________________________________
> QGIS-Developer mailing list
> QGIS-Developer at lists.osgeo.org
> List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer