Feature Proposal: Add HeadlinesPlugin to Distribution

Motivation

Two way RSS feeds are expected nowadays. TWiki should ship with frequently used features, hence the need to add the Plugins.HeadlinesPlugin to DakarRelease.

Description

This was briefly added to DakarRelease, than removed without any discussion: Bugs:Item699.

-- PeterThoeny - 17 Jan 2006

Impact and Available Solutions

Discussion:

I created the Plugin and recently handed the maintenance over to MichaelDaum. Michael probably will soon add Atom support, but that does not affect the release of Dakar. The last stable version of the HeadlinesPlugin can be added to Dakar.

I personally do not see any reason why not to ship it with Dakar, RSS feeds are used in many companies using TWiki. I suggest to ship the Plugin with Dakar, but to have it disabled by default.

Lets give it one week to see if there any voices pro/con this request.

-- PeterThoeny - 17 Jan 2006

Note that every plugin shipped with the release significantly increases the workload on the team building the release, as shipped plugins require more testing.

If you take the "no reason not to" approach to extremes, we end up shipping every plugin with DakarRelease, disabled. This approach is favoured by some. Personally I think it bloats the release package excessively.

IMHO we need some rules for deciding whether there is a "reason to" ship a plugin, not the reverse.

1. Is it of such direct benefit that the majority of installations will want to install it anyway?
2. Is it of sufficient quality that it could be shipped enabled?
3. Is it fully tested against the planned release?

For HeadlinesPlugin my answers are (1) no (2) probably (3) no.

I would far prefer that the promised work on plugins classification in TWiki:Plugins (i.e. quality badging) was done, rather than adding plugins willy-nilly to the release. If there was a Plugins "seal of approval" then this could be added to the set of recommended plugins.

I am definitely CON.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 17 Jan 2006

The reason I removed this plugin from DakarRelease, was simply that it wasn't used by the default installation, and I wouldn't know how by what criteria I would want to include this plugin, but leave out the 100+ others.

The criterias that Crawford lists, seems very reasonable to me - but finding out what the majority of installations actually chooses to install is of course a tricky detail on 1). Download logs + feedback frequency?

I agree on his assessment of HeadlinesPlugin as well.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 17 Jan 2006

Don't add this plugin to the release. Instead, package special-purpose TWiki bundles.

Current state of the plugin: it already has atom support for quite some time now. The current svn version is more stable than the one on twiki.org. There where 5 pre-releases uploaded to HeadlinesPluginDev. There's been very little feedback -- except from AntonAylward -- and obviously not enough testing by others. From my point of view releasing is just a matter of assigning the version nr 2.0 taking the current svn version.

-- MichaelDaum - 17 Jan 2006

Michael, then please go ahead and release it in the Plugins web. Don't forget to bump up the year of copyright. I will update the TWiki entry in the WikiMatrix for Atom feeds once the Plugin is published.

Crawford:

1. Larger corporate installations typically do as I have seen at workplaces and book interviews, so it is a "it depends" who you ask answer
2. "yes" on quality, but if shipped it should be disabled
3. "yes" for testing, with reservation on number of people testing

Lets leave this open for a few days to see what other people want to say.

-- PeterThoeny - 18 Jan 2006

Ok.

-- MichaelDaum - 18 Jan 2006

i recon we shouldn't bundle any plugins, and that default content should not require them. I like plugins to be options, and every plugin that gets bundled seems to get used inthe default content too, resulting in a bigger and more complex set of distributed topics.

instead, I'd much rather see Plugins and contribs become an easier to manage addon - and getting configure to enable and disable plugins was one step in that direction.

-- SvenDowideit - 18 Jan 2006

CategoryFightTheFlab