Re: [Banshee-List] Combining Unofficial Banshee Extensions [was: List of third party extensions on the website]

[Gabriel Burt <gabriel burt gmail com>]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair gmail com> wrote:
> On Saturday 30,January,2010 11:44 PM, Bertrand Lorentz wrote:
>> On Fri, 2010-01-29 at 16:00 -0800, Kristopher Dick wrote:
>>>       * https://launchpad.net/banshee-remote-plugin/1.0/1.0  Allows
>>>         remote control of Banshee via the BansheeRemote app on Android
>>>         phones.
>>>       * https://launchpad.net/banshee-listening-post/smtp/1.0
>>>          Provides the basic functionality of sending e-mail messages
>>>         to a preconfigured recipient when the track changes.
>>
>> Cool, I didn't know about those two, thanks !
>> I added them to the page, and I also added the "Radio Station Fetcher"
>> and "Stream Ripper" extensions that I missed before.
>
> Cool, we have more extensions now!
>
> Since we've got a significant number of extension packages that need to be
> transitioned every other Banshee release, I'd actually like to propose everyone
> getting together and merging all the off-tree extensions into a single
> code-base, and synchronizing releases with Banshee's release, in something like
> an extension pack of sorts. In fact, I think the banshee-unofficial-plugins
> project on Google Code was started with something like that in mind.
>
> This would make package maintainers' jobs (like mine, among others) much easier
> -- no need to maintain separate packaging trees for each extension. To give an
> idea on the volume -- if we have 10 different packaged extensions, and say, 3
> versions of a distro that we want to backport the version to, that's 30
> different packaging trees we have to maintain. And all of these have to be
> transitioned every time a new Banshee release which breaks API/ABI appears. *cringe*
>
> There will also be benefits to the maintainers of each extension, of course. The
> most clear of these would be that each extension maintainer will not have to
> maintain his/her own entire Autohell (or other, probably inferior) build system.
> Last I checked, Banshee.CoverFlow has no build system, for instance. With a
> combined project around, it should be trivial to integrate a new extension into
> the tree, similar to how it can be integrated into the current Banshee tree.
>
> What do the extension maintainers think? I'd like very much to hear from all of you.

I think this is a good idea.  Gnome Do does this, with their
gnome-do-plugins repo/package.  They also distinguish between
Community plugins and Official ones.  I think this repo should be
hosted in git, using gitorious.org as the primary repo, so people can
clone/maintain it easily.  If you want to write a Banshee extension,
just make an account there, clone the banshee-community-extensions
project, run a script to create a new skeleton extension, and start
coding!  Bertrand, what do you think of moving to git hosting?

As a side note, I think it's ideal for plugins of sufficient
quality/general interest to get moved into Banshee's source tree
itself (to become an "Official" plugin - perhaps we could call them
"Core" instead).

Gabriel