[GSOC 2013] Easy plugins with a website

[Bhaskar Kandiyal]

On Thursday 25 April 2013 11:47 AM, Mark Doliner wrote:
> I worry about:
> - How to build plugins for a variety of OSes?  Windows is probably
> easy.  For Linux... would we statically link to dependencies?  Maybe
> for everything except glib and gtk?  And who should build the plugins?
>  Should we require plugin authors to upload various binaries?
> Creating an automatic build system that builds for Windows and various
> Linuxes is a significant amount of effort, and probably not worth the
> time.
Uploading binaries would be the best way imho for various platforms and
the plugin authors would specify which platforms the plugin is
compatible with. I'm not too familiar with the internals so I can't
comment on the libraries the plugin will be statically linked with. And,
I agree, a build system would be too much effort and would require a
significant amount of resources.

> - As a Linux user I try to only install software using my package
> manager.  Installing software via this interface would be hard to go
> through the package manager.  Installing plugins in ~/.purple/ isn't
> so bad... but it CAN lead to confusion if the user ALSO installs the
> plugin via their package manager.  If there are two versions of a
> given plugin installed, which one should we use?  We currently don't
> do a good job of messaging this problem to the user.
If there is a plugin that is installed system-wide as well as locally
then in my opinion the local one should be given preference if the
versions match. If the versions don't match then we can either use the
plugin which is the latest version or let the user choose which version
they wish to use. An option to 'Prefer system-wide plugins' can also be
added to address this issue.

Cheers,
Bhaskar Kandiyal