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

[Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 3:00 AM, Akkana Peck <akkana shallowsky com> wrote:
> Just agreeing with a few of Ofnuts' points:
>
> Ofnuts writes:
> > Author:
> > - communications with users: forum, etc. Mail notification necessary
>
> +1. With the current setup, I remember going to a page I'd made for
> one of my plug-ins and discovering there was a question there from
> four years earlier that I'd had no idea about.
>
> > - ability to share/transmit ownership
>
> Good one!
>
> > - I don't think this system should be a place to maintain/share the source
> > code. We could however enforce a FOSS/CC discipline and require the source
> > files to be provided (for some assets, this could mean the original XCF/SVG
> > file...)
>
> I like the experiments Pat has been doing with making links inside a
> repo that link to other repos. If the GIMP plugin repository can
> include files from a developer's site on github or wherever,

This experiment was about a perfectly hand-curated small set of
plugins. I completely understand that this is also very interesting.
But Pat does not need me to do this. If that is what people have in
mind, I won't be onboard. Don't get me wrong. This is still very cool,
I support the project and I could help from time to time. But this is
not as high a priority for me as other things. And that's a completely
different project to the one I am talking about.

I am talking about a plugin management system, with a user side
(within GIMP, to be able to browse hundreds of plugins,
install/uninstall them, automatic update when there are new versions…)
and a developer side (a way to upload their plugins, which can be as
basic as uploading a zip of their code, up to fancy GIMP-hosted
repositories).
The curation is not contradictory to my idea and could be used within
the bigger plugin management system (there could be a small set of
GIMP team-maintained plugins, or team picks, and "approved" plugins,
etc.), but this curation cannot be the technical base of the whole
system.

Because no, using a central git repository with submodules to
user-maintained repositories inside it is not scaling up! I don't see
at all actually how submodules could be the base of anything for a
plugin management system.

> that solves the problem of developers who are actively improving
> a plugin but forget that they also need to update the version on
> GIMP's repository.

No, setting a submodule for a given third-party repository does not
magically give you write access to this repository (and fortunately!
uhuh). You'd still have to fork if you want to improve the code of a
given repository when the original author is not responding. Once
again, this is manual curation.

> > User:
> > - straightforward, no-questions-asked downloads
> > - easy registration for forums
> > - semi-anonymous use of forums (guest mode without registration, but with
> > some more hurdles such as captchas)

Why would we have forums? We are talking about a plugin system. We
could have comments on plugins, why not. And *if: we decided to have a
source hosting (gitlab or other), then obviously bug reports. But
that's it.

Now if people want generic official forums (I know I don't, we already
have mailing lists, enough for me), that's a completely different
discussion.

> > - search capabilities
>
> - browse capabilities, by category or keyword: browsing all the
>   plugins in the color category isn't the same as searching for
>   everything that has the word "color" anywhere in the description,
>   a major problem with the previous plug-in repository. And maybe
>   also by date: browse the recently added plugins.

I agree with most features above. But just to make things clear: we
can't have all this for a first release. But yes this kind of things
have to be prepared from the extension format (with keywords, and
categories/tags for instance).

Also let's not compare with the old registry. This was just a
glorified do-it-all website where anyone could just upload anything,
with basically no failsafe whatsoever. This had never been thought as
a plugin system, but was only a generic hosting system (Drupal if not
mistaken). In my opinion, there is basically *nothing* to be used from
the old system.

If you want to compare, please let's compare with good existing plugin
directories out there (Firefox, Wordpress, whatever has a huge base of
plugins) and try to see what works and what does not work well for
them. Let's work with good examples.

Jehan

>         ...Akkana
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