Hi, Tino Schwarze <tino.schwarze@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Why would you want to reinvent the wheel? Follow Unix philosophy: Use > tools which are already there. > > I propose: > 1. let the user use the package tool she wants > 2. make plugins relocateable (I guess, not only RPM can do that) > 3. provide easy integration of any additional files (help, data etc.) by > means of directory structure etc. > > We do not need to care how one gets those Plugin packages. We do not > need to care for depencies (we should however propose a standard way to > name depencies). I aggree. It shouldn't be our task to think about binary distributions. We brought up the issue because we think that having all plug-ins in the main tree does not make sense in the long run for the following reasons: - The core maintainers shouldn't have to care about maintaining plug-ins. - The plug-in authors shouldn't have to worry about the gimp core. - Bug reports, patches, etc. should go to the plug-in maintainers directly instead of being handled by the core developers. - Gimp gets too large with all the plug-ins included (think of package size and overlhy crowded menus). I do not think that the current approach of using a sourceforge gimp-plugins module is a good idea. The core and the plug-ins should be on the same CVS server. This would allow us to include core plug-ins virtually into the main gimp CVS tree and it will make it easier for core developers to apply changes to a whole bunch of plug-ins that become necessary after an API change in libgimp. If gnome-cvs can not do this for us (because it only has all-or-nothing permissions), we need to look for another CVS server. Eventually our employer convergence could help, I'll ask. > We just need to care for a place to install the plugins > in so that Joe User is able to install a binary plugin without root > access. We already have that: ./gimp-1.2/plug-ins and we have a tool that helps with from-source installation of simple plug-ins: gimptool. What we should think about are some rules all plug-in packages have to follow to make it easy to compile, install and package them. A description file should be part of these rules. Another thing that should be mandatory is that each plug-in needs to have a maintainer. Salut, Sven
