[Gimp-developer] Gitlab as a replacement for registry.gimp.org

[Pat David <patdavid gmail com>]

Continuing on some discussions from irc...

Registry.gimp.org is down for the count.

I was thinking recently about some ideas for a possible replacement.
Mostly thinking along the lines of what made the registry work well for
folks.

In the rest of this email, I'll use the term "asset(s)" to refer to things
like plug-ins, scripts, or brushes/gradients/curves/other assets.

Some essential functionality based on the old registry drupal instance:

1. Upload/Download assets for GIMP.
2. Describe the asset (usually by the uploader).
3. Comment on the assets.

This was handled previously by using drupal, which treated each entry as a
post/node that included the ability to upload files, write about the files
as a post, and had comment threads below it.

Keeping this functionality would be good, I think.  The ability to post an
asset is a given, but the ability to interact around it helps foster the
community (and provides nice feedback for the authors).

> From those thoughts, what would be nice to have in a replacement:

1. Provide at least the same previous functionality (as listed above).
2. Managed or easier to manage and keep updated.
3. Easier account management.
4. Collaborative environment for shared assets
5. Support possible GIMP integration in the future (one-click asset
install?).



GitLab?
======

Initially, I had thought Github might be a good option for this but given
its closed-source nature decided to investigate something like GitLab
instead.

I like this idea personally due to some nice infrastructure:

1. The service is hosted + managed (and available as Free Software just in
case we felt we needed to break out and host it ourselves).
2. The service integrates OAuth sign-in using a few different account types
(lowers barrier to entry to participate).
    a. they use accounts, Google, Twitter, Github, or bitbucket accounts
for sign-in.
3. Projects maintain all the git-goodness for control and tracking
4. Projects created as a git project can have a full description/README
along with issue tracking integrated in the site

So, we can fulfill the original registry functionality and get the added
benefit of a git infrastructure for those wanting to contribute, user
accounts using OAuth to make it easy to participate, and the ability to do
some interesting things (git submodules).

In speaking with Jehan about this, we should also consider what might be
needed to support the ability to install assets from within GIMP in the
future easily.


Organization
=========

Jehan suggested that each script/plugin/asset have it's own git repo.
This would be handy, particularly if script authors did this as well (as it
considerably eases the inclusion of external repos as submodules).
However, akk points out that many folks don't (won't?) organize their repos
in this way (it gets a little... unwieldy pretty quickly if you have many
scripts).

I'd like some input on what would make the most sense or work best for
possible organization of repos.

I was also thinking that we could include some simple metadata in both any
script files and the README.md files as a means to possibly help parsing
relevant information for automated inclusion at a later date (GIMP plug-ins
installer type of idea).


Curation
======

Initially I was thinking that curating the scripts for inclusion would be
important.  It's certainly possible for a smaller subset of all of the
available scripts from the registry now to pick out ones that we use and
check that they're not malicious and properly tagged/included.  For
instance, there's a handful of scripts that I personally find myself using
often and can help validate/curate for inclusion.  I don't mind doing more
as needed.


I just wanted to get a discussion started about how we might consider
moving forward on something like this.  I think the scripts/plug-ins are
important enough to users that it would be good to try and get something up
and running soon.

I have started experimenting with including submodules from other author
repos and how it might look here:

https://gitlab.com/GIMP/GIMP-Scripts/tree/master

I look forward to hearing some thoughts on this!

pat
-- 
Pat David
https://pixls.us
http://blog.patdavid.net