Re: Rise of the Plugins

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Vincent:

> UI and code sharing
> ===================
> Every time a new module is getting the plugin love, I'm seeing this: "I
> stole the gedit/epiphany code and integrated it". Wow. Copy and paste?
> Would it be possible to share all this code in a library? (maybe it's
> not, I don't know: I didn't look at that code)
>
> Also, each module is having its own plugin/extension manager dialog, and
> they are all looking the same, but with small variations. Wouldn't it
> make sense to standardize this? Again, maybe a library could help.

Since this topic has come up, one issue worth thinking about is
licensing.

Many modules that have plugins use the same license for the plugins
as for the application.  For example, rhythmbox and gedit plugins
are under the same GPL license as the application.  I suspect not
a lot of thought went into deciding what license to use for these
plugins.  Does the GNOME community recommend that plugin libraries
should be under GPL or LGPL or does it matter?

If we are thinking about moving "common" plugin code to a shared
library, do we expect this common library to be GPL or LGPL?  Since
much plugin infrastructure seems to be copy and pasted around
and is much existing code is currently under the more restrictive GPL
license, it would be good to come up with some guidelines so that we d
don't end up causing a licensing headache down the road.  Obviously
GPL'ed code shouldn't be copied into LGPL libraries and vice versa, so
this might make it hard to take existing code and move it into a LGPL
common library.

Since it sounds like there may be plans to revamp the plugin framework,
I think figuring out the right approach to licensing should be done
at the same time.

Brian