Community repo?

[ManuelSchneid3r]

The question on how to get all the effort people made to the streets has always bugged me. There are dozens of plugins out there available only for users willing to find the needle, having some term-fu skillz and know how Albert plugin machinery works.

That's sad and I wonder how we can get these easily availbe to the entire community.

The python repo and the idea to get everything shipped upstream is not really a solution because, the person writing a plugin, the one using it, the one who want it to be published and the one willing to review and maintain is often not a single person. As such plugins often linger around without much audience.

On the other side there are plugins that should probably not be shipped because it's a niche plugin and hardly anybody is going to need it. To separate between shipped, general purpose plugins and a community repo may help here.

Then there are these problems for packagers with git submodules. Shipping them upstream is problematic for several reasons. Pulling them at runtime could solve this.

Technically I think about giving the Python plugin the ability to add git repository URLs pointing to repos having the same structure as the main repo, such that it can clone it into its data dir and use it as well. This could also serve as staging area for future upstream plugins.

We had a community repo in the past but tbh it got almost no attention at all. What do you think? Should we give it another chance?

[Bierchermuesli]

is this a followup to #1155 ? another chance for the community repo or the ability to a git repository URL?

To help finding the needle I guess there would be a easy way to make a index based on github topics/tags albertlauncher (or https://github.com/topics/albert-extensions ?

[ManuelSchneid3r]

Not really. #1155 is about getting them awesome ones shipped now that 0.18 is done. I'd rather avoid making it easy to the regular user to execute unreviewed code. The public ones are alway reviewed by me at least. The idea of a comunity is to have reviewing being independent of my reviews (sometimes plugins stay for years in the PR stage). But well this required at least "some" community effort. (meaning not beeing zero, like the last time I tried to establish such a thing)

[ismasou]

For python, I like the idea of a simple plugin manager inside Albert that just uses git under the hood to clone and pull updates of plugins from any git repo.

[ManuelSchneid3r]

I'd rather avoid making it easy to the regular user to execute unreviewed code. Everyhing else should be fine in the public repo or a potential community repo. I mean if you know how git works it is not really more complicated to achieve this without albert beeing involved at all (ya know git clone http:…/python ~/.local/share/albert/python/plugins and pull to update). But the regular user, which is not aware of the risk of malicious code pulled from the web, is fortunately probably not capable of this.

[ManuelSchneid3r]

Looks like this is still not the time for such a thing. I'll close this discussion.