On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Tom Boutell <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is a valid point, but in the real world other developers are not
> exactly breaking my door down asking permission to contribute to any
> of my plugins.

I understand that, but we have to investigate the cause of this
problem. I guess that very few people use or even know about your
plugins. Again, I think the root of this problem is the current
situation about the plugins. There are too many plugins with too
little information about their quality and about differences between
similarly named plugins as well as too little documentation.

I personally mostly go for custom solutions, because the time required
for finding an appropriate plugin, getting to know how to use it and
debugging it hugely exceeds the time required to write the required
functionality myself. I can well imagine that other developers feel
the same.

> Most of the time a few "burning souls" do most of the
> work on any given project.

Well, that's always the case for OSS with little publicity.

> The prefixes also serve to keep the sf namespace clean for new core
> plugins

Why should the core team release functionality for something that is
already actively being developed by the community?

> they prevent me from getting stuck if somebody *else*
> abandons a project which is camping on the "right" name for something
> I want to do.

In this case nothing holds you back from taking over the lead of the
abandoned plugin and to work on a next major release.

> Well, no, this is what open source licenses are for. Anybody can pick
> up any MIT-licensed plugin and fork it tomorrow morning, if need be.
> And that has happened in the past in other open source projects when
> the original developers lost interest.

I see that, but you cannot compare the size of these projects with the
size of the average plugin. There's just no point in forking an
abandoned plugin that covers maybe 1000 lines of code. Such a plugin
cannot even be considered "complete", so somebody should take the time
to finish it off instead of forking it.

I would really like to know some plugin development and usage
statistics. In the past, Fabien only ever released information about
how many new plugins had been published. I don't think that this
information is very useful. I rather would like to know the average
development time before plugins are abandoned, the ratio of
functionality vs. users etc. If we had these statistics, we could base
our investigation of the "plugin problem" on some real facts.


Bernhard

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