contributed plugins

All I did this weekend was think about the contributed plugins problem. 
As I see it, our goals should be as follows:

   1. allow people to write plugins that modify PyBlosxom's base
      functionality
   2. provide a registry for people to query what plugins are out there

We do that now.  That's originally all I wanted to do with PyBlosxom and 
the registry.

Over the last few months, I've been thinking about the following 
additional goals:

   1. provide version control for plugins
   2. provide a hosting facility for plugins
   3. provide testing for plugins

The first and second could be tied into the existing registry.  We want to 
store all versions of all plugins because some versions work with specific 
versions of PyBlosxom.  For example, I have a series of plugins that work 
with Ted's new comments, but don't work with the comments that (until 
recently) came with PyBlosxom.  So users of the older comments module are 
now screwed whereas if I had versioned my plugins and provided all 
versions, they'd be ok.

I'm not sure about how to do number 3.  How can we adequately test all 
plugins--even ones we didn't write and don't have any documentation for? 
Right now very few authors provide documentation in their plugins--can we 
expect them to provide test cases?  Should we have different levels of 
support: level 1 (no documentation, no testing), level 2 (documentation 
but not testing), level 3 (documentation and testing)...?


The problems with the above involve the following:

   1. what happens if plugins contain copyrighted code that was stolen
      from elsewhere?
   2. what happens if the author stops supporting the plugin?  when
      we discover this, should we mark the plugin as orphaned?
   3. other problems?


Continuing on...  there seems to be a one-sided conversation of people who 
need certain functionality that doesn't exist.  Should we provide some way 
for these people to get in touch with other people who want to write 
plugins?  How should that work?  Should we add a "plugins requested" feed 
to the web-site?

That's what I've been mulling over this weekend.  Any thoughts?

/will

-- 
whatever it is, you can find it at http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/
except Will--you can only see him in real life.


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