My answer below On Sat, 2010-01-30 at 12:55 -0800, Gabriel Burt wrote: [CUT] > > > > 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? I'm starting to like the whole idea, it'd be great to get as many extension authors on board as possible. After giving it some thought, here are some suggestions : 1/ The name banshee-community-extensions seems a good name. No need for further classification of the extensions. The Gnome Do wiki has the Official/Community distinction, but apparently the gnome-do-plugins package does not. 2/ Infrastructure Using git on gitorious.org sounds good. It'd be easy to give commit acces to extension authors and anybody who wants to help. It would be nice to have simple instructions for devs who are not familiar with the whole branch/merge thing. I guess the tarballs would be hosted on banshee-project.org ? I'm not sure what should be used as a bug tracker. 3/ Creating a new extension In order to find a way to ease up that process, I had a quick look at Quickly (https://edge.launchpad.net/quickly) - pun intended. I think it would be possible to create a banshee-extension Quickly template, but I'm afraid that installing Quickly itself would be problematic on anything else than Ubuntu. So I'd say some kind of script would be better, as Gabriel wrote. If feedback is positive, I'll try to start working on setting up the project on gitorious at the end of this week : basic structure and build system, using my Alarm Clock extension as a guinea pig. If you want to help out, ping me ! In the meantime, I'd be happy to hear any suggestions. -- Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com> > http://bl-log.blogspot.com <
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