Re: Moving some plugins back into the main tree?

On Fri, 5 Jan 2007, J.M. Maurer wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 14:38 -0500, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> > Dominic Lachowicz wrote:
> > >
> > > Now that libgsf is a requirement and some of our import/export plugins
> > > are getting both more popular and more robust (eg. OpenDocument), I
> > > was wondering if we might consider moving some of the plugins back
> > > into the main tree. I'm concerned that we're making life more
> > > difficult for our users than it needs to be.
> >
> > I don't see the benefit of moving them. Our user get it from
> > distributions or installer, that is what matter: what comes pre-build.
> >
> > The advantage of having them as plugins in the development tree allow:
> > 1/ building AbiWord alone and with a selected number of plugins.
> > 2/ faster build-test cycles, including better modularisation. Think
> > about relinking AbiWord each time you want to test changes to a plugin.
>
> >From a developer and packager point of view, I totally agree with you.
>
> But practically, it is useless to blame a distributor for not packaging,
> say, ODT by default. If AbiWord can't handle ODT 'out of the box' from a
> users point of view, they will just blame us.

This is part of why I said a bigger "default" package is a good idea.

Hell others make their users download a whole office suite when the only
really want a Word Processor ;)

Having a much bigger default package is especially harmless if we also
provide another smaller package, which could be what is currently being
shipped or smaller. Distributions such as Damn Small Linux a rare group
who care about size and even other small distributions exclude abiword.
Larger distributions have found their excuses to exclude abiword and it is
disingenuous of them to blame the size of abiword because if they really
wanted to fit abiword in there are a fair few programs they could
trivially put on a diet to free up space, and I dont use the word
trivially very often.

> In the end, for me the user's experience is more important that my
> developer experience.

Sssh! Dont tell the developers. :)

-- 
Alan