Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New Ploticus plugin

[Jim C. <ji...@in...>]

On Jun 3, 2004, at 9:13 PM, Reini Urban wrote:
> Malcolm Ross Kinsella Ryan schrieb:
>> Should we perhaps separate the development of plugins from the main 
>> wiki
>> engine in CVS?
>
> Why?
>
Other projects have done it, which isn't exactly a recommendation, but 
just an acknowledgement of the thinking.

The core phpwiki is *capable* of running plugins, and indeed needs to 
have a couple of nice examples to encourage people to get writing them. 
But is a plugin author necessarily "good enough" to be a phpwiki 
contributor? Not necessarily ... so perhaps they should have a 
different CVS tree?

Also, some of the more interesting plugins (like VisualWiki) have 
external dependancies on things like graphviz software, that the core 
phpwiki does not rely on at all.

If the plugins and wiki are packaged together, the packager either has 
to include (a reference to) all the external dependancies of the 
plugins (even if the end user never uses them), or has to allow 
"possibly-broken" plugins to be installed.

So we immediately have a good argument to separate out at least the 
external-dependancy plugins.
I think it's reasonable to consider separating out all the plugins - 
they are not core functionality of phpwiki, they are not needed in 
order for it to work fully, they are optional code.

You could still release a phpwiki+plugins package, as well as a 
phpwiki-without-plugins package. More choice for the system 
administrator.

-jim