[josm-dev] How external plugins are added to plugin list

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, Josh Doe wrote:

>> http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Plugins
>>
>> You should be aware of the drawbacks:
>> a) Plugin is marked as "bad external" in JOSM
>> b) It is not translated
>> c) Core changes aren't incorporated into it when they appear
>> d) Shortcuts won't be listed in overview and thus also very likely be used
>>   by others very fast.
>> e) There is no automatic history handling for older JOSM versions.
>
> Those are certainly drawbacks to consider. I've added a section on the
> wiki regarding this:
> https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/DevelopersGuide/DevelopingPlugins#Publishingaplugin
>
> What script generates the plugin list? And since there are previous

A cron job scanning all the plugin manifests and adding some 
auto-generated lines for SVN plugins.

> versions for two of the external plugins, I take it that you're
> updating that by hand?

Any remote maintained plugin can use the same mechanisms as the ones in 
SVN. But they are no longer automatical. So you need to setup an own 
translation infrastructure and update the manifest accordingly. Same for 
the old revisions. And nobody fixes your code, when we again change the 
JOSM interface (which happens frequently, as we have no real API).

So basically the idea is - if we have control over the code in the SVN, 
some automatics and some care are the thanks for this. Works pretty good I 
would say - Most code is in OSM-SVN. :-)

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)