Hallo, Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I think then there could be a simple distro system like Eclipse has for managing plugins. (Basically, there is a simple format for posting a library to a website. The user then adds the repo URL to the program, which then has a browser for all available installation options and updates).
Recently another metaphor came to my mind - and of course it has to be taken with a grain of salt like all metaphors: Mozilla vs. Firefox/Thunderbird/Sundbird, ...
pd-extended to me very much feels like Mozilla in that it tries to provide as much "apps" as possible crammed into a single-click installable suite. Compare that to Firefox, which is only a very basic browser with functionality stripped down so much, that the first thing everyone does is install some extenstions. Nevertheless Firefox took off in a big way and Mozilla is more or less dead.
I think, this had two reasons. First reason: People who liked the browser in Mozilla didn't care about the mail component at that time. They used Mutt, Outlook, or whatever. (Funnily now that it's a separate app, Thunderbird became popular as well.) The second reason is the extensions and theme system of Firefox which made it very easy to install only the updates, that a user is interested in, without all the bloat of Mozilla.
I don't know if something can be learned from that history, though.
Ciao