Maurits Rijk wrote: > I just had a look at the code of some of the plug-ins and I noticed that > there is often lot's of room for improvement: Yep. > <snipped...> > So my question: is it worth the effort to carefully go through all the > code (not only plug-ins) and clean things up? Worth relates to whether a plug-in is worthy. Surely, the effort of a generally worthy plug-in deserves all the maintenance it can get. That is the idea behind the PLUGIN_MAINTAINERS file which Sven Neumann inaugurated on 4 January, 2000. Quite frankly, plug-ins compete for mindshare. Worthy plug-ins accrue individuals willing to maintain them. Maintainers shake out as much of the cruftiness that their time and talent allows and balance the advantages and disadvantages that Mr. Rijk advanced. The beauty of this is plain: the worthiness of a particular plug-in is not based on my humble opinion, nor yours, no anybody else's. It is simply based on the fact that it has accrued a maintainer, someone who cares enough about it to fight code rot. Now in the 240 days or so since PLUGIN_MAINTAINERS has been in the CVS tree, about fifty-five plugins appear to have garnered maintainers, out of a population of 165 or so. Of the two-thirds without regular maintainers, quite a few are like cacti, requiring little water and even less soil, they continue functioning with only occasional maintenance from bug fixers. Others are -- well, you can inspect the bug reports as well as I and correlate the unmaintained titles with outstanding reports. If, in the event that something like a 1.2 Official Release should crowd close upon us, and a motion is made to reduce the size of the distribution, I would claim that an unmaintained plug-in with outstanding bug reports is an ideal candidate to oust from the package. There would be unbiased and quantifiable reasons to do so. My two U. S. cents. Garry Osgood
