[Design] Re: [Chandler-dev] Removing plugins and what else for Preview?

[Andi Vajda]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007, D John Anderson wrote:

>
> On Feb 6, 2007, at 9:53 PM, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
>
>> Katie mentioned that we plan to remove plugins from Preview. This
>> prompted me to get a clarification of what exactly do we want to remove
>> in Preview.
>> 
>
>> Test menu (we'd probably want to move some more of these items to the
>> remaining menus)
>
> Since many of the items in the test menu are useful for tracking down bugs 
> when working with users I propose that we have some hidden command key 
> combination, e.g. "control shift T" toggle the presence or absence of the the 
> test menu. That way when working with people who have bugs we can tell them 
> how to turn on the test menu and use its features to help narrow down bugs.

+1

I would suggest doing the same for the plugins. Hide the "Experimental" menu 
and make it show with some ctrl-key combination.
A .tar.gz of the projects directory excluding pyc/pyo/.svn is 300k in size, 
hardly a big deal from a download standpoint.

I think that eliminating the plugins altogether is counter-productive from a 
developer community building perspective. Anything that makes it harder for 
developers to look at code showing how Chandler can be extended is 
counter-productive.

While it is true that these plugins are in various state of completion or 
disrepair, they are way better than nothing.

If we were to ship the plugins, even in hidden form, some work remains to turn 
them off. I believe Flickr is active all the time in the background. Not good.

Shipping the plugins with a hidden menu is by far the least amount of work 
both for Bear/Heikki and for outside developers who could use the regular 
Chandler distro to build their extensions.

Andi..