Russel Winder wrote:
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.
I think both these things are good goals.
It is already easy to install a plugin:
- Add the plugin jar to a repository
- Declare a dependency on that jar in your settings.gradle
Everything we do to make dependency management better, also makes plugin
management better. For example, when we allow dependencies to be
specified using files, you won't need a repository, and you can, in your
build file, point at ~/.gradle/plugins, or whatever.
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.
This is a good idea.
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.
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