How to develop and deploy plugins?

[Sebastian Wahl]

Hello Krita devs,

I have been looking into how to get Krita to load and save FLIF
images. Since I had already made a Qt plugin I hoped Krita would pick
it up automatically, but no luck there.

So I located the plugins and I would just copy the BMP plugin and
change the MIME and extensions to FLIF's, but I can't see how to
compile it outside the Krita codebase. (So for now I just recompiled
Krita and patching the lines into the existing plugin, works great.)
I did find some old documentation for Krita 1.6 which links to a SVN
repository which doesn't exists anymore.

So what is the current policy on third-party plugins? How should I get
the needed headers to create a dev package? Or do you want all plugins
to be pushed upstream?
I think FLIF support in Krita would be great, but I regard relying on
my Qt plugin as more as a quick and dirty solution rather than a long
term solution. (No 16-bit, encode settings, etc.) My usage of Krita
right now just isn't big enough currently to warrant spending the
work.


A note on the image formats plugins, I think it is a bad idea to
hardcode the formats support into the plugin meta-data. You could get
support for lots of formats easily by picking up other image loaders,
but since they are often also plugin based, you can't determine this
at compile time without risking plugins missing at runtime. (It does
require some sort of priority system in case of multiple plugins
supporting the same format, but that is also the case if third-party
plugins are allowed.)

Best Regards,
Sebastian Wahl