Third-party service plugins

[Seb Ruiz]

Hi all,
I've been thinking that it would be a good move to start a sort of
program/infrastructure for plugin developers to create extensions to
Amarok. For the time being, specifically for services. I'm sure that
we're going to get an influx of requests for services which are
perfectly valid, but not going to be done because of either:
  a) lack of developer resources;
  b) lack of developer interest; or
  c) target market is too niche to bundle with Amarok proper

Scripted services are excellent, but do not expose enough
functionality and are not flexible enough (with UIs, configuration,
meta types, notifiers, etc)

The perfect example of this is libre.fm, a foss last.fm clone
(https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190213).

We could have an amarok-extras svn directory which would provide third
party devs with all the resources they need to create their own
plugins.

It would be up to the developers of these plugins to do releases and
coordinate translations etc, but could be easily packaged up by
distributions as an amarok-plugins-extra package, for example.

What we would need to do:
  a) Setup an svn dir. (easy)
  b) Provide initial infrastructure (build system, easy installation).
(moderate)
  c) Ensure stable ABI. We won't be able to get away with detours such
as bumping a plugin version number since plugins will be externally
handled. (hard)
  d) Provide templates/tutorials for creating plugins. (moderate)

Why we might not want to do it:
  a) Lack of resources to get it off the ground
  b) Too much work to maintain a stable ABI
  c) Lack of interest from the community/third party devs

ps - I've CC'd Matt Lee, who might be interested in such
infrastructure to develop a Libre.fm feature.

-- 
Seb Ruiz

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org/