Re: [gedit-list] Gedit Plugins - Unofficial Enhancement Proposal

[Steve Frécinaux <nudrema gmail com>]

On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 00:40 +0000, Zeth Green wrote:

> Rationale
> =========

> The plugin architecture of Gedit is very nice for people like me who
> want to write Gedit plugins, however it is frankly horrific for the
> end-user to install them, especially if they are new to Linux. If one
> has to use the command-line to install a plugin, then the user might
> as well use Emacs.

You might have a look at NewStuffManager
<http://www.k-d-w.org/index.php?page=newstuffmanager> (and eventually
contribute ? ;-))

> 1. Single Plugin Format
> 
> All plugins have a .gedit-plugin file. However, beyond that, at the
> moment, plugins can be organised in two ways. They can be a single
> file, or they can be a directory. This inconsistency will make it very
> complicated for graphical plugin installation and especially
> uninstallation.
> 
> I propose a single format. All plugins will basically follow the
> directory approach, but the gedit-plugin file will be inside the
> directory.

This is mostly an implementation matter. If you have some graphical
plugin manager, he will deal with that by itself. You download the
tarball and the GUI installs it correctly. That's how the theme manager
works fwiw and there is no problem about that. BTW you seem to forget
there are also C plugins (yeah, a third "format", even harder to
install).

> 2. Single Plugin Location
> 
> It is too confusing for the user to have more than one plugin
> location. I am proposing that there will now only be one place to
> install plugins. I.e. ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

What's wrong with having a system-wide directory where to put plugins ?
Firefox does that too, just it doesn't have any plugins by default...
The approach of putting everything in $HOME is likely to fail wrt
distro-provided plugins and wouldn't make l10n easier.

> 3. New Button - "Install New Plugin".
> 4. New context menu item - "Delete Plugin".

UI stuff, likely to be handled by NewStuffManager if/when it comes.

> 5. No bundled plugins.

I don't agree. Bundled plugins are either there for ages (when nobody
even knew gedit supported plugins) or functionnalities that are so great
we want them as visible as possible. Some are even activated by default,
and we can't reasonnably implement it as part of the core. More,
packaged plugins (either gedit or gedit-plugins ones) come with full
support for i18n, and that's important.