gnome-software and external plugins

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

Hi,

It looks like gnome-software will allow external, out-of-tree plugins:
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2016/05/19/external-plugins-in-gnome-software/

we discussed it a little on IRC on #gedit (related to libpeas).

(A discussion on a mailing list is easier than on blogs.gnome.org).

I wanted to comment with my experience on gedit. gedit allows external
plugins since a long time, probably more than a decade. I'm a relatively
young contributor to gedit, interested by the gedit core codebase
(making it more re-usable), but there is a big problem: maintaining the
gedit API. We cannot refactor the code freely without breaking the
plugins.

I think that Firefox is also struggling with its plugin system.

So, allowing external plugins looks appealing, and in the short term it
is probably not a problem. Problems arise later, when you don't have the
choice: either you need to maintain the API and it gets in the way, or
you break all third-party plugins.

My 2 cents,
Sébastien

PS: on an orthogonal matter, gnome-software doesn't use libpeas, I've
filed this bug about it:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=766775
libpeas supports in-tree and out-of-tree plugins fine.