[OSM-talk] JOSM Plugin-Manager was: JOSM "simplify way" option

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> are you adding all those new cool features as part of JOSM or as  
> plugins? I'd prefered them as plugins, but I see the problem of  
> distributing a large number of plugins.

The simplify way function is a builtin in the preview I have put on  
my server but I think (in contrast to the "forget" function or split  
way/join way) it is rather a "specalist" function that would deserve  
to be put in a plugin. OTOH I hesitate to create loads and loads of  
plugins, and in the end you'll need 20 of them to be able to work at  
all.

If we are heading towards a situation where we have many really small  
plugins for really small functions, then we will also need a good way  
of organising them and we will have to do some bookkeeping (which are  
current, which outdated etc).

> What we need is a plugin manager with an (automatic) update  
> mechanism, like JEdit has. I had a look to the jedit code, but  
> there's a lot of stuff we need to adapt, but there's also a lot we  
> can reuse. But it's not a copy/paste adaptation. The main class is  
> org.gjt.sp.jedit.pluginmgr.PluginManager so if anybody wants to  
> have a look ...
>
> What it does: load an xml file that contains all the plugin  
> descriptions, versions and dependencies from a server and compare  
> to the currently installed plugins.

I wouldn't want to double the number of lines of code in JOSM by  
adding a sophisicated plugin manager ;-)

Maybe we could start by creating a machine readable list of plugins  
(in the Wiki?), adding a "getVersion" call to the plugin interface  
and displaying a list to the user (plugin so-and-so, installed  
version so-and-so, latest version so-and-so). And do automatic  
downloading etc. later.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'