[Gimp-developer] Idea of a Plug-In manager

[Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>]

Hello Ingo, and all GIMP devs,

I found you are the registry.gimp.org maintainer, so I hope it's ok
for me to send you this message. I am a GIMP developer, and a GIMP
user just gave me an idea and I found it very cool, so I am trying to
"check the water temperature" and see how feasible it would be.

Basically he was interested in a Plug-In Manager, which could be a
master plug-in in GIMP able to browse the plug-ins, their description,
note and comments, and install/uninstall them in a click. In other
words, a plugin manager a-la Firefox. And I thought that was a really
cool idea.

I don't see this as any priority, and likely such a thing would not
happen in the next major release. But maybe for GIMP 3.0 for instance,
that would be an awesome feature, in my opinion. Even more since GIMP
2.10 would likely break compatibility with many plug-ins, with the
full switch to GEGL, that would be a good time to start a structured
plug-in repo.

As I see it, one of the pre-requisites would be to have a more
structured registry. Not just drupal free-form pages (it can still be
drupal, I don't really care, but there should be semantic logic of the
page and its contents, to know the plug-in name, with files in the
right format, which version it is reported to work or not, etc.).
So I was wondering, do you think this kind of change could be possible
in some future of the registry.gimp.org website, or do you just let it
run without any plan of further improvement? The latter is fine, and
that's still nice contribution, just to know if you were up for
bigger. :-)

Of course there would be more pre-requisites for such a project, like
more contributors involved to manage such a registry, I think. But as
I said, I just check the temperature to see if anyone is interested.
And also, I repeat, this is just an idea thrown out there. No code or
anything like this yet.
Right now I just discussed this idea a little on IRC.
Thanks for reading.

Jehan