Serendipity Composer Update | Uniify plugins in core and additional_plugins

[surrim]

There are four plugins which exists in Serendipity and additional_plugins:

Plugin name	S9Y	AP
serendipity_event_gravatar	1.63.1	1.62.3
serendipity_event_multilingual	2.36.2	2.35.1
serendipity_plugin_authors	2.2	2.2
serendipity_plugin_quicksearch	1.2	1.2

There should be only one source. Everything which is optional should be in additional_plugins.

[stevleibelt]

Just for the four eyes principle, @surrim is right. All mentioned plugins are available in additional_plugins and plugins.

[garvinhicking]

I believe the reasoning at some point was to "bundle" important plugins with our core release. The better way would've been to do this via on-release bundling - which we weren't able to do "back in the days". Also I think we did some things with the plugins that affected their core compatibility, but I'm not sure of this.

A problem is that when we now move plugins outside of the core, they'll not get deleted when people update.

So maybe the best course of action is to "just" synchronize the affected plugins?

The ideal way of course would be to make plugins be composer packages, migrate the core to use composer for plugins too, and then create a proper release architecture.... I did some initial work for a composer move (see the git branch), but I can't do it alone and need some motivation (&time). 🥹

[stevleibelt]

@garvinhicking Is there a list or "howto"-Section you can point volunteers to support you on the composer task?

[garvinhicking]

@stevleibelt That would be terriffic, and might get me involved somehow. It's just so much that I'm seeing a steep hill I'd have to climb alone. Serendipity has a very small userbase and I'm just not sure there is "public demand" for that. But the task at hand would be a cool one, and we'd all learn a lot from it. So... if there are volunteers (LIKE YOU? :-)) then please do get in touch.

I'm still on the s9y.slack.com, but the more transparently public we can communicate this, the better.

I've just updated https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/feature/composer/README.markdown#concept again to add some thoughts...

( @onli )

[onli]

@garvinhicking Just to make sure you have seen it, @mmitch also volunteered to help at https://www.onli-blogging.de/2323/comments.html#c10436

[onli]

I synced serendipity_event_gravatar in s9y/additional_plugins@640af83. Interestingly enough it was backwards: The gravatar version in the s9y repo was the newer one and contained two commits of fixes. Backwards, because the plugin is in the two repos to have it 1) as a bundled plugin and 2) to still be able to update it without a s9y release. Seems like that wasn't all that useful, if it was never used.

Maybe we remove those four plugins from spartacus instead and only keep them in the core? It was probably a misjudgement to think that we need the capability to upgrade them without a release, they are stable enough.