[GMG-Devel] plugins: status and future

[will kahn-greene]

Hi!

We talked about this at yesterday's meeting, but no one showed up, so I 
figured I'd send along a status email which I meant to do last week anyhow.


Status
======

Plugin infrastructure has landed! This includes the following:

* scaffolding for plugin support including loading and configuring plugins

* some rough documentation on writing plugins

You can see the documentation now. It's in the new Plugin Writer's Guide 
of the documentation:

http://docs.mediagoblin.org/#part-2-plugin-writer-s-guide

Please take a look at the Quickstart. It's rough--if you find issues 
with it, please let me know.

That's it!


Future
======

We want to do the following:

* implement a bunch of plugins

* add more to the plugin API so that writing plugins is easy

* add more documentation so it's easy to learn how to write plugins you 
want to write


To get from here to there, we're going to go through an 
evolving/bootstrapping process. The way it's going to work for now is 
like this:

1. someone starts working on a plugin

2. that person discovers he/she needs to be able to do xyz in the plugin API

3. that gets turned into an issue in the issue tracker

4. we talk about how to implement that keeping in mind other use cases 
and generalizing where we can

5. we implement it

6. rinse/repeat


As we're going through this, we'll evolve the API and get a better feel 
for use cases and how it'll be used. If we need to make changes we will.

Then at some magic point in the future, we'll draw a line and say, "this 
is a decent API and future changes can't break API compatibility" and 
then we'll become very conservative about making changes to the existing 
API.

How will we figure these things out?

Anyone interested in commenting on bugs can comment. At a minimum, I'll 
be helping with that. Chris, too.

The rest of it will get discussed at MediaGoblin meetings which happen 
the first Saturday of every month.


That's where we're at and the future!

/will