[QGIS-Developer] Understanding plugin management in QGIS: Meta data fields

[Nyall Dawson]

On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 at 21:34, Sebastian M. Ernst <ernst at pleiszenburg.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Etienne, Nyall,
>
> thanks for your replies.
>
> >> Then a plugin can have or not a processing provider (not related to the statement before).
> >
> > Just to expand on this -- this tag was added to aid in
> > https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/34617 , [...]
>
> Ok, this makes sense. I just tried to trace the use of this flag and -
> as far as I can tell - it's only being looked at in
> `QgsPythonUtilsImpl::pluginHasProcessingProvider` in
> `/src/python/qgspythonutilsimpl.cpp`, which is not called at all (as of
> today's master, at least). So just to be clear: The flag is not being
> used *at the moment*?

Right -- but #34617 will land soon (for 3.14) , so it's soon to be
actively used. And there's a handful of plugins out there which
already expose this metadata in prep for #34617.

Nyall

>
> With respect to my last remaining question:
>
> > I understand that `id` is *the* unique identifier for a plugin.
> > Eventually, it will be the folder name of the plugin module and it
> > usually equals the name of the plugin distribution zip-file (without the
> > `.zip` file extension). If this is correct: What's the purpose of
> > `zip_repository`? Its description reads "the remote repository id".
>
> What's the story behind `zip_repository`?
>
> Best regards,
> Sebastian