> On Jun 6, 2016, at 10:01 AM, Vlad Grigorescu <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 2) From a developer's perspective, submitting to "CBAN," maintaining and 
> updating their code should be as painless as possible. Let's not forget that 
> at the end of the day, the only thing that matters in making this project 
> successful or not is developer contributions. If people aren't contributing, 
> none of this has any point.
> 
> The first goal is the reason we moved away from bags and carts. However, I 
> think we're in danger of straying too far away from the second goal. I think 
> having containers which manage both scripts and plugins would be a mistake.

Yeah, we do need to keep the goal of making things easier for devs/authors, but 
I’m wondering if having the top-level containers be plugins doesn’t actually 
make things a harder for people who were only writing scripts to begin with?

They now have to learn what a plugin is and how to make one instead of just 
being able to ship their directory full of scripts and have it work.  Let me 
know what you think.

> A scenario that I see as being quite likely is that a developer starts such a 
> container as being script-only, but wants to expand it at some future date.

I’m following Matthias on this in that I see such a super-container at the 
top-level being able to deal w/ changing from script-only to scripts+compiled 
in a way that’s transparent to users.  We may also want a form a pinning that 
allows a user to say “don’t upgrade this if it changes from script-only to 
compiled code”.

You had some good implementation detail questions about how to make this work 
well that I think all have answers, so in interest of keeping the thread 
shorter I won’t go in to them now.  But let me know if you see one problem that 
will be particularly tricky that we should go into detail about.

> I believe that any issues with the name of "plugin" versus "package" can and 
> will be quickly cleared up when the project is released. I'll note that the 
> script plugin component is actually the only one currently documented here: 
> https://www.bro.org/sphinx-git/devel/plugins.html 

Yeah, I’ll concede maybe people will get used to it, but I at least need to be 
working from a design spec that tells me exactly what to do concerning that 
page.  If we start using “package” in one place I will eventually need to start 
talking about how a “plugin” works and refer to that page, which is currently a 
user-facing doc.  Do canonicalize it to use “package”? Do I leave it alone and 
just have a non-sequitur transition in talking about “packages” and then 
suddenly “plugins” ?

If we switch the design to instead user the super-container format, then that’s 
not an issue for me anymore because the relationship changes from “is a plugin” 
to “may have a plugin”.

- Jon

_______________________________________________
bro-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.icsi.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/bro-dev

Reply via email to