I am writing this without doing proper research, so I may be way out on a limb.
Experience from the Bazaar community is that having a core and an infrastructure for supporting contribution plugins creates a good community. Conversely where a system is centralized and controlled, contribution is more difficult and the community is not as vibrant. For the Gradle 0.6 release I think it needs to be really easy for people to contribute plugins. All this needs is two things: 1. Easy installation of a plugin. 2. Easy advertising of a plugin. With Bazaar all a user has to do to install a plugin that is not part of the standard distribution is to install the plugins directory hierarchy to ~/.bazaar/plugins (on Unix-like systems, something else on Windows). Bazaar checks this directory -- along with the centralized ones so site-wide installation is possible as well -- every time it runs and installs all the plugins it finds. Advertising is all about having a Wiki page to which people can add their plugin with the URL of the plugin branch/repository. Anyone wanting to use the plugin can them simply branch/clone the URL to the installation location on their machine. Having a page for centrally maintained plugins (which is centrally controlled) and a page for community provided plugins (which is a free for all), means that users can know that there is a pool of plugins that are provided effectively as part of the core. There can also be movement between "central" and "community" plugins as the role of a plugin changes. There is a whole lot of other stuff but it is a next level of detail so let me send this now to get people's reaction. -- Russel. ============================================================ Dr Russel Winder Partner Concertant LLP t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203 41 Buckmaster Road, f: +44 8700 516 084 voip: sip:[email protected] London SW11 1EN, UK. m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected]
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