We've talked about before, and Aaron and I have recently talked about it, should we package extensions? I'd like put some ideas and questions forward so that people can rip them apart and we'll end up with something good :)
The basic idea is that we may want to start shipping extensions packages somehow separately from the core Inkscape package. There are several reasons for this:
-- Dependencies. The dependency checking in Inkscape will always be a toy when compared to dpkg and rpm. And, we don't want to require every package in Debian just to install Inkscape.
-- Versioning. It might be more reasonable to have effects on a different release schedule if there were a larger collection of authors. Something more like OpenClipart's monthly release.
-- Modularity. If we ever expect for people to be able to ship extensions for Inkscape from outside the project umbrella the tools to do so need to be good, and packing some of our own extensions externally would force use to make them reasonable.
Reasons to just throw everything into the Inkscape tarball and live with it:
-- Simple. Releases are a pain, more releases need to be justified.
-- Complete Solution. Have you ever seen a public forum where someone posts a new program, and then 90% of the questions are "What theme did you use in the screenshots?" Multiple places to get extensions means that everyone won't have the same set.
I think, that there is compelling reasons to start a new package for extensions, which brings the next points: how should it work?
-- Granularity. Should each extension be it's own package? Should they be grouped by functionality (input/output/effect)? Should they be grouped by common dependencies (inkscape-extensions-{python,perl,pstoedit})
-- Versioning. I'm kinda thinking that we should just do <inkscape major>.<inkscape minor>.<extension release> That way extensions could be released independent of Inkscape, but still, you know what version of Inkscape they are tied to.
Okay, I think that was verbose enough for now, if you made it this far I'm impressed.
--Ted