Hiu Jeremy, > OK, it sounds like your concerns are with the UI for making plugins, and > perhaps with the name “plugins”. I was worried that you were seeing issues > with the plugin architecture, since we can improve the UI but it’s tricky > to change the architecture at this point. >
Admittedly, and as anyone can possibly notice, I have yet to publish an actual plugin. So far, I have shied away from leveraging the mechanism for the purpose of distribution, mostly due to an unaccomplished development / node / guthub-workflow to that end on my part. Interestingly, except Erwan who does rely on that for indexing plugins, I don't think I've read any demands so far that asked for this or that this or that macro be wrapped up and shipped as a plugin. In the long term, I can see that the mechanism does perhaps provide better means to provide for any (semi-automated) upgrade procedure via some future tb5 plugin library against which to check for updates. ~ Back to simple "bundles" and the context of "let's (allow to) create the simplest *plugin* possible": One should be able to not specify a version, maybe even plugin-type, and all that jazz and still have a "bundle of tiddlers" created / imported. Following your instructions here <http://tiddlywiki.com/dev/#How%20to%20create%20plugins%20in%20the%20browser>, I can see that the following won't do to create the simplest of "bundles": title: bundle type: application/json {"tiddlers": {}} with title: foo tags bar baz and then in the console: $tw.utils.repackPlugin("bundle",["foo"]); There are a number of issues with this: 1. if I have to declare a *plugin-type*, I'd rather want to use a plugin-type that indicates we're packaging a simple *bundle*, not a plugin - in fact, any unrecognized *plugin-type* should possibly be interpreted as that 2. I do not want to fiddle with any versioning at the very beginning - as it proves problematic for importing (the same version) - so I need to repack my plugin - but then the constituent tiddlers are gone - so I need to find a way to start from a wiki with "unpacked" plugin components - too many things to consider 3. *repackPlugin* should either - a) never delete constituent tiddlers - which means that you won't be able or even intend to use the "bundle" in the wiki you created it (in the browser) - since we still have the constituent tiddlers as real tiddlers, which is fine anyways - in that sense, a user could be provided a button that creates a bundle on the fly whenever they want to grab it - from whichever constituents they desire - b) repack tiddlers that are already part of the bundle as shadows if they don't exist as real tiddlers - as, obviously, those initially bundled tiddlers are now gone - but then, how to remove one already packed? - mhhh, maybe via some option to *repackPlugin* For what it’s worth, I quite like the word “plugins”, closely followed by > “bundle”. “Plugin” at least describes what one does with one of these > things: they are designed to be plugged into wikis. The trouble with > “bundle” is that we need a word that communicates the differences between a > plugin (with it’s upgrade logic) and a bundle (without that logic). So > right now I’d use “bundle” to describe a JSON file containing a bunch of > tiddlers. > Exactly, a bundle would be a json file containing a bunch of tiddlers *unpacked as shadows*. There would possibly be a basic upgrade logic for "bundles" as well, namely: skip any version checks entirely. This could be achieved by setting an option flag for *repackPlugin* to not set any version, as we're not interested (yet) in doing so. Alternatively, a good alternative could be a *YYYY-0MM-0DD-0hh-0mm-0ss* version rather than the versioning scheme the name of which escapes me atm. But then, again, a set version comes with the troubles of not being able to import the same or lower version. And with a bundle I possibly don't want any of that. I just want to use that bundle as I just grabbed it. The community is doing a good job exploring UIs for making plugins, and I’m > confident that we will evolve better approaches. > Surely, I'm very interested in this and I'm sure that trying to (allow users to) start from the most basic "bundle" users may indeed eventually find themselves wanting to leverage more features / aspects of full-blown-plugins, e.g. versioning. But I'd be all fine to have this a gradual process, rather than one requiring literacy of all the intricacies of versioning, plugin-types, dependences, etc... Best wishes, — tb -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/2a9099af-9291-48c4-a8c4-b6ffc1f41ba4%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
