[josm-dev] Plugin Popularity

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>    the number of plugins becomes ever larger, which is good.
>
> I would like to amend the JOSM "User-Agent" header to contain not only
> version and language, but also a list of installed plugins - e.g.
> instead of today's
>
> JOSM/1.5 (2069 SVN en_GB) Java/1.6.0_0
>
> I would transmit
>
> JOSM/1.5 (2069 SVN en_GB; wmsplugin, validator, slippymap) Java/1.6.0_0
>
> This would enable us to make an estimate about which plugins are most
> popular, and we could rank them accordingly - assuming the most popular
> ones are also the most important ones.
>
> If you find this undesirable (it is a privacy issue but we have already
> sneaked in the version and language without asking anyone), then I would
> like to find some other way to indicate to new users which plugins are
> those commonly used.

Presumably you're talking about the real HTTP User-Agent that's sent
to josm.openstreetmap.de (and elsewhere). If so: great.

But if those were going to be saved in changesets I think it's time to
start thinking about not showing all this information into a single
string. It's required for HTTP since you just get one key-value pair
to work with. But at least for Potlatch I was considering changing the
current created_by string into something like:

    created_by = Potlatch
    created_by:version = 1.2c
    created_by:user_language = is
    created_by:runtime = LNX 10,0,32,18
    created_by:potlatch:editing_mode = live

What do you think about adding this to created_by=* too but perhaps in
the above form before we all have to implement huge & complex
libraries to parse created_by strings? Splitting these up would also
allow plugins to e.g. include their configuration information.