[QGIS-Developer] Maintainance of QGIS Plugin repository

Sun May 5 05:30:05 PDT 2024

Greetings,

On the subject of plugin maintenance two points from my side:

1.	The web page that provides guidance <https://plugins.qgis.org/publish/>  for publishing a plugin, stops short of mentioning that there is an plugin approval process in place. It would be great if this is mentioned in this guide with a few words how the approval process works, and above all how long this takes.
2.	It is nice that plugins can be rated using stars, and as a plugin writer, its is certainly nice to receive five stars. However, it is not at all clear:

a.	what the basis is for such a rating
b.	who submitted that rating

In any web shop you can nowadays post user ratings for purchased products or services, but 

c.	There is always a text box to explain your opinion
d.	You need to leave your name behind

I think the above two points would help improve the quality of the QGIS Plugin repository.

Kind regards,

Bart Duijndam

From: QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of Jorge Gustavo Rocha via QGIS-Developer
Sent: Wednesday, 1 May 2024 00:04
To: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] Maintainance of QGIS Plugin repository

Hi Admire,

Thank you for helping with the plugins.

I think we can lower the administration time, if we can enable reviews by the users. Not just voting (that we already have), but written reviews. Written reviews can address issues you mentioned: 

- Duplication of functionality. Plugin functionality already exists in QGIS.

- Plugins containing binaries (and related problems)

- Plugins which are a fork of an existing plugin

- Etc

As an example, Wordpress has about 60k plugins [1]. The submission process and rules are similar [2]. But the credibility about each plugin is mostly based on user's reviews, votes and number of downloads.

Basically, we already almost the same data as wordpress about plugins, but we miss user's reviews. User's reviews can add value.

What do you think?

Regards,

Jorge Gustavo

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/

[2] https://wordpress.org/plugins/developers/

On 30/04/24 21:38, Tim Sutton via QGIS-Developer wrote:

Hi Admire

Thanks for this! We can certainly task Lova with helping to streamline the process, implement better moderation tools etc. With regards to deleting plugins, I think we should take the approach that we in general do not physically delete things, rather we unpublish them with a flag that removes them from the plugins.xml, search on the plugins page etc. I think it would be prudent to maintain the chain of evidence in case we ever have a dispute or complaint about a plugin.

Regards

Tim

On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 2:41 PM Admire Nyakudya via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org <mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> > wrote:

Hi All

I help out in the approval process of QGIS plugins. There are various issues that are listed  https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Django/issues to streamline the approval process of plugins.

Over the years there has been a steady increase in plugins that are not approved <https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/unapproved/> . This is due to a number of reasons:

* Duplication of functionality. Plugin functionality already exists in QGIS.

* Plugin authors not willing to address issues raised during the approval process.

* Plugins containing binaries (Not really sure about the policy here).

* Plugins which are a fork of an existing plugin and then they get renamed to something else without permission from the original author or the author is no longer interested i.e https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/active_fire2/.

* Old plugins that still use the old architecture i.e Python2.

Could we either implement the following changes to maintain/cleanup the plugin repository.

* Old plugins that were never approved because the author did not care to resolve issues flagged be deleted from the repository i.e https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/ban_adresse_locator/

* Plugins that have vague names and offer functionality that is ambiguious i.e https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/upload/ be deleted.

* We could automate the deletion of plugins where feedback has been received but the author hasn't done any corrective measure maybe after a month or couple of months. 

* Automatically flag the plugins which are not approved to Deprecated after some time. 

I think the above and other recommendations will encourage people to use the plugin repository properly as currently it feels like a dumping ground.

On a side note: What is the policy for plugin names. I know it is up to the author to give his plugin a suitable name but something like https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/transfer_layerfilegdb_to_geopackage/#plugin-versions looks like a description rather than a name.

Regards

Adire

-- 

Admire Nyakudya

GIS Engineer

Work: Sand Technologies <https://www.sandtech.com/> 

Location: Home Address <https://w3w.co/amused.thunder.wins> 

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*	GitHub <https://github.com/NyakudyaA> 

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