Direction of Pidgin development

[Andrew Roeder]

>From: Etan Reisner <pidgin at unreliablesource.net>
>To: Dale Worley <dworley at pingtel.com>
>CC: devel at pidgin.im
>Subject: Re: Direction of Pidgin development
>Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 06:08:37 -0400
>
>On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 10:46:19AM -0400, Dale Worley wrote:
>While I fully understand and appreciate the sentiment and idea behind this
>it adds an incredible level of complexity to the working of plugins, and I
>don't mean from a code point of view. The 'Configure Plugin' button is
>large and lights up when a plugin with a configuration page gets loaded,
>that is good and obvious. People already have enough trouble with plugins
>that add items to the Tools menu, let alone the plugins that add buddy
>right-click menus, I can only imagine the confusion that would ensue if
>people started needing to load a plugin and then go searching through the
>entirety of the preferences dialog looking for the preference setting that
>the plugin they loaded just added.
>
>And while you couldn sort of solve that by having the plugin tell them
>where to go look how is that better than having the configuration in the
>Plugins dialog directly? Also, what about people who use a pidgin that is
>preconfigured to have some plugins loaded and so never realize that some
>preference they really like comes from one and then when they go install
>it themselves go crazy when they can't find it. And yes, people really do
>lose settings or forget they set them all the time.
>
>
>So, to sum up, while I like the theory I think in practice it causes more
>issues than it solves.
>
>     -Etan
>_______________________________________________

Personally the problem i'm seeing with the plugin system is that, Pidgin 
comes with a load of default plugins already, if they are going to always be 
distributed with even the source of pidgin, or packaged in its default 
installer, they might as well not be plugins, obviously they're important 
enough to be designed into Pidgin's preferences instead of thrown into the 
"plugins" section.

My annoyance with the new "plugins" is that they're just cluttering up the 
plugins menu, when i go to plugins  I want to see modules loaded that I 
personally added of my own accord, not the default set of Pidgin options 
that should be located in preferences.

But I'm not going to argue that we should move everything back to 
preferences, rather maybe just plugins should be built with flags that 
concern what the plugin does, then loaded into appropriate categories under 
plugins such as: GUI Plugins, Chat Plugins, Away Plugins - you get the idea. 
  Then when people build their personal plugins that are not distributed 
with Pidgin, they may add the appropriate flag for it to load in the 
according category.

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