From: Jonathan A. <ja...@ce...> - 2002-09-20 18:18:17
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Hello Josh, On Friday, September 20, 2002, Josh Trutwin wrote... > I love SM, but I really hate maintaining plugins. The reason is > simple, I often can never be absolutely sure of the version of some > of the plugins I have installed, unless I download a new tar file > from the plugins page. Some plugin developers are very good about > being clear which version of the plugin you have by putting it in > the top of the README file and by including the "version" file in > the tar file that is used by the Plugin Update plugin. I think maybe a doc might be in order in the Wiki describing the best way to setup a plugin for developers, ie, which files to include and such. There are a couple of plugins have that driven me crazy purely because they didn't create the tar.gz file of the directory, but rather the contents inside, so where I am used to just running: tar xzf <plugin> from the plugins dir, I then have to delete files, create a folder, move the tar ball into folder, then re-run the same command. A nice readme, and maybe a version file would be a great addition. Even if version wasn't included, at least readme should have some kind of standard heading which should include the version of the plugin, and (maybe?) last update date... at least that way, we can work out how often it is updated, if it is needed etc. > Also, when I untar a new release, there are some directories already > in the plugins directoy, stuff like filters, spamcop, squirrelspell, > etc. Some plugins get moved from being a mere plugin made by developers for their own use, and others uses, to being core plugins, which are distributed with the SM releases. Those are added as they were considered to have a good feature set, and may be requested frequently. This normally means that they are maintained by the developers of SM and (maybe) the original author of the plugin. > Can I assume these are the latest greatest versions of these plugins? In some cases, at that point, sometimes the development of the plugin ends up splitting between what the developers update to keep plugins in working order, and what the author of the original plugin has added such as new features. It might be worth doing a comparison of the plugins mentioned, and see if anything is very different. > Does that mean that the README file is wrong? Could very well be. I did some updates for the spamcop core plugin, and I don't remember seeing any updates to the README, but it is possible I missed that, as I didn't do the CVS Commits ;) > My plea to all plugin developers: Please, please, please include a > README file with your distribution that contains the version number. > Also include the "version" file for the Plugin Update plugin. I think (as I said) that maybe a standard format should be setup, requesting minimum files, such as readme, version, and setup.php, tar'd into a file as such <plugin>-<version>.tar.gz. Another thing would be to always request the files are tar'd at the folder level, and not the files themselves... for example: plugin/myplugin # cd .. plugin# tar czf myplugin-0.1.1.tar.gz myplugin/ That way it saves killing the wrong file when extracting them again. (I think that is how the command is done... I may have file and dir backwards ;)). > Do other people find this frustrating, or is it just me? Very... hehe... especially the directory thing ;) > Should I post this to SM-PLUGINS as well? This list seems to get > more action. It may be an idea. -- Jonathan Angliss (ja...@ce...) |