On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 10:04 +1100, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote: > On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 7:55 AM, Gabriel Burt <gabriel burt gmail com> wrote: > > On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair gmail com> wrote: > >> 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? > > It's probably worth noting that GNOME Do is planning to break out the > monolithic gnome-do-plugins branch into smaller pieces. We've got > nearly 100 plugins in there, and it has become a bit difficult to > actually track bugs properly - particularly since the plugins see > wildly different levels of maintainer interest. > > We're also going to remove the community/official distinction; it's > not very useful. It doesn't change the level of bugs, and only serves > to make the plugin UI slightly more cluttered than it needs to be. > > This isn't going to be an immediate problem for Banshee, and may not > be at any point - there's more scope for Do plugins than for Banshee > extensions, I think - but is worth contemplating, if only to decide > that it's not going to be a problem. Thanks for sharing your experience ! I don't see us reaching into the realm of 100 extension either, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong in the future. "A dozen Banshee extensions ought to be enough for anybody" ;) Out of curiosity, do you know how the GNOME Do plugins are going to be broken out ? By quality/support level (ala GStreamer good, bad and ugly) or by feature categories ? Any advice, technical or process-wise, is of course welcome ! :) Cheers -- Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com> > http://bl-log.blogspot.com <
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part