History: Using profiles to replace mods
Preview of version: 7
Status as of 2012
- Mods is code in SVN: http://tikiwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tikiwiki/mods/trunk/
- Most of the mods are abandonware and most of the good stuff was merged into core a long time ago but there are a handful of useful/maintained mods which are not in core because of licensing
- Mods can't deal with versioning
- Mods can't deal with translations
- The Mods installer hasn't been improved in years and it's unlikely someone will step up.
- Mods installer can't work in some places because of file permissions
The Idea
- Mods is a packaging/distribution tool for files managed in a SCM (SVN). Instead, profiles could be used to deploy and wiki pages could become the SCM, with a nice Web-based source code editor
No change
- The license of the content can be GPL because the user installs themselves
Benefits
- Contributors can contribute via the browser (especially interesting for translators)
- We would be using maintained code
Challenges
Translations
- How to sync SVN with the wiki?
- Translation branching strategy
- How does get strings and other other tools need adapting?
Binairies
- How to deal with binairies?
- Profiles could be improved to handle binairies
File permissions
- mods has a web installer
- PluginArchiveBuilder can generate the zip on demand of a bunch of files and we let people install themselves if file permissions are an issue
Long term
- We could imagine moving translations completely to this, but we would need to upgrade our scripts