On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:51:47 +0200, Michael Schumacher <schumaml@xxxxxx> wrote: > There's one aspect to splitting things out that hasn't been discussed > yet. By splitting e.g. a plug-in out into it's own module and basing it > on gimp-plug-in template, it becomes incredibly easy to compile it for > any platform without going though the hassle of having to compile GIMP > itself. This would be especially interesting for those plug-ins that > have dependencies not already covered by GIMP or GTK+ itself, e.g. AA or > XPM. Note that doing splitting things out and using the gimp-plug-in-template will significantly increase the build time because each plug-in would then run its own configure script, which can take longer than building the plug-in itself. I can already hear Dave complaining. ;-) > Additionally, this would send an important signal to plug-in developers. > Currently, some of them think that being included in the core gimp > module is the ultimate goal of their plug-in. [...] Besides the advantages of being distributed together with the GIMP, including a plug-in in the main tree has another advantage: the translations. Currently, it is rather hard for a plug-in distributed separately from the GIMP to have good translations in many languages. If it is in the main tree, several translators will (have to) work on it. If it is outside, chances are that the developer will not be able to get enough people interested in contributing translations. One way to solve this would be to put many plug-ins in a gimp-plug-ins module in gnomecvs, but that would only shift the goal for the plug-in developers from being included in the main tree to being included in the "official" list of plug-ins. Maybe that's better than the current situation? Note that it would only work with one (or just a few) module in cvs, not with dozens of separate modules because it would be more motivating for the translators to cover just one new module than having to look at many modules containing very few things to translate. This also takes into account the fact that gettext tries to be smart about handling identical strings that occur multiple times in the source tree, which makes the translators' life easier (sometimes). -Raphaël
