[Chandler-dev] Yet another proposal for Chandler plugins

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:44 AM 2/14/2007 -0800, Ted Leung wrote:
>On Feb 14, 2007, at 9:03 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>At 05:15 PM 2/13/2007 -0800, Ted Leung wrote:
>>>On Feb 13, 2007, at 4:57 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>>>At 04:33 PM 2/13/2007 -0800, Ted Leung wrote:
>>>>>So while README's are good,
>>>>>they aren't nearly enough.
>>>>
>>>>Yes, I'm just saying that this doesn't seem to me to interfere or
>>>>compete with Andi's proposal.  Andi has uses for the functionality
>>>>and the willingness+ability to develop it -- which is not really
>>>>the case for what you're proposing, IIUC.
>>>>
>>>>At least having README's and buildable plugins goes a good way
>>>>towards having examples that others can tinker with.  Improved
>>>>ability to tinker (e.g. the menu proposal) is also helpful.
>>>>Arguably, good tinkering support is at least as important as
>>>>reference documentation and tutorials, which we already have
>>>>several of.
>>>>
>>>>Obviously, all documentation can always be improved, but in terms
>>>>of rounding out what we have, Andi's proposal does help to fill out
>>>>one of the weaker spots.
>>>
>>>Andi solicited feedback on his proposal and I gave it.  If you guys
>>>want to ignore it, that's your perogative.
>>
>>Ted, in this thread:
>>
>>http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2007-February/ 006301.html
>>
>>you +1'd a proposal that differs very little from Andi's as far as
>>I can tell in practical terms.  It would be helpful if you would
>>clarify why your opinion appears to be so different now.  Note that
>>both proposals call for plugins to be initially inactive, and to
>>have a UI facility for accessing them.  Andi's proposal allows us
>>to offer more features in the plugin selection UI (i.e., the
>>Cheeseshop one) at comparable cost.
>
>The proposal I thought I was +1 ing involved a single menu item (a
>binary toggle) to enable or disable all the demo plugins at once.
>There is no plugin activation UI, no browser for discovering new
>plugins, etc, which is what would be needed for the plugin selection UI.

Ah... now I see.  There's some context from the conversation between Andi 
and I that I now see wasn't clear in the proposal posted, or at least an 
assumption I had from our conversation that wasn't reflected there.

Specifically, I assumed that we would not need to make anything available 
in preview except the ability to pop up the platform web browser, pointed 
at the Cheeseshop page for Chandler plugins, similar to this page for Trac 
plugins:

    http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi?:action=browse&c=516

To me, popping up a web browser seems less challenging than an 
"enable/disable plugins" feature to implement, hence my confusion.


>>I'm confused by your remarks at this point because I don't
>>understand what developer documentation has to do with the subject
>>at hand (i.e., what to do about plugins in the Preview release).
>
>The subject at hand (in my mind) is do we include the demo plugins.
>The reason why is to encourage developers to try writing their own
>plugins.   Given that as the ultimate goal, if we are going to spend
>time doing more UI than the binary toggle,

Right -- and I'm seeing it as *less* UI, with most of the items Andi 
proposed being 1.0 items rather than being blocking features for 
Preview.  If some of them (appropriately prioritized) happen to make it to 
Preview, then great.  But the only one I see as essential would be the one 
that gets you to a page with plugins.

So, something like a "Plugins" menu with an "Install..." item, that just 
pops up a dialog saying that future versions will have something fancier, 
and for right now we're going to launch your web browser to a page that 
lists OSAF-developed and user-contributed plugins, and please see their 
individual web pages for instructions.

Anyway, that's what I'm visualizing from Andi's proposal in the Preview 
timeframe.


>then I would rather see us
>spend the time on more docs.   But I would be plenty happy with just
>a binary toggle for Preview, and I've given up hope that we will get
>any more dev docs by Preview.   We just have too many other things
>(like performance) to work on.
>
>Does that help?

Yes, thank you.