Plugins and SVN

Plugin authors have two ways of working. The first is the "traditional" way of working: developing a plugin on your machine(s), building a tarball or zip file, and attach it to the topic. If you work this way, there is no problem with continuing to do so.

The preferred path is to use SVN, the use of which is explained in SubversionReadme. The advantage of using SVN:

• Full change control and traceability given by Subversion (SVN)
• The whole development community can help fixing bugs and testing your plugin.
• The developers can search through the code of all plugins in SVN to see the impact of changing core code. Especially when it comes to API updates and security related stuff.

On the TWiki SVN plugins are maintained in only one place, called the svn trunk. You will find copies of the plugins in various older branches but the official one and only trunk as of 17 Feb 2008. http://svn.twiki.org/svn/twiki/trunk. The TWiki Core can be found in twiki/trunk/core.

See SubversionReadme, DeveloperResponsibilities, SubversionBasedTWikiInstall and PluginsInSubversion for up to date information about code development in TWiki and the use of SVN (Subversion).

-- Contributors: MeredithLesly, CrawfordCurrie, KennethLavrsen, SvenDowideit

Discussion

Sorry to be a pest, but:

1. The described multi-branch process was discussed after the fact, e.g. after implementing it. A subsequent discussion (in EdinburghReleaseMeeting2006x03x06) ended without agreement, hence the move to SingleBranchPluginDevelopment.
2. This is not the right place to document SVN use. Extension authors are asked to Plugins.ReadmeFirst, discover the SVN related topic there (also located in the Plugins web)

-- PeterThoeny - 04 May 2006

And Plugins.ReadmeFirst links to Plugins.PluginsInSubversion which would appear to be the correct place to put anything this topic would hold, and any decision made in SingleBranchPluginDevelopment will likely be reflected there.

Plugins.PluginsInSubversion appears to be outdated in how it talks about branches, so maybe the above content should be refactored into it.

Either way I'm going to delete this topic in a couple of days as it is redundant. (Which is not to say it wasn't useful while it existed)

-- SamHasler - 04 May 2006

Please... don't remove this topic until some solution is found in SingleBranchPluginDevelopment and is documented someplace. The discussion is beyond the extension management, is aboud the future development & release methodology to be used in the future.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 04 May 2006

Note that the topic intro has been updated to reflect that all plugin developement is now done in the MAIN branch only.

-- KennethLavrsen - 08 Oct 2006