[RFC] Using a package manager for plugins

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
tooling

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points to inspect. First clarify the plugin discovery, download, versioning, update, and GitHub fallback requirements, then map those requirements to the existing plugin installation flow. Done would mean an agreed package-manager design and an implementation plan with testable behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

question

While it's still early days for plugins in Noteplan, it might make sense to keep all the "blessed" plugins in this Github repo, but longer term, that'll start to get untenable. Specially when it comes to releases.

Using a package manager like NPM might make a lot of sense. Using registry.npm.org URLs it's fairly straightforward to search, get details and download packages that can go directly to the Plugins folder.

Here are the benefits to this approach:

  1. Third party packages can all follow a naming convention (e.g. noteplan-plugin-commandName) and publish them on NPM and they will become easily discoverable for users.
  2. NPM packages have versioning built-in and it will become easy for different plug-ins to be updated independently and for Noteplan to periodically check for updates easily by package name.
  3. Since NPM allows for an independent .npmignore file it'll become easy to ignore built files for GitHub and ignore source files for the NPM package. This way Noteplan doesn't have to download any unnecessary files.
  4. It should still be valid to use a Github URL to manually download plugins that aren't on NPM. (without all the extra feature though)

Possible downsides:

  1. Churn - NPM can be an additive feature so that the churn can be kept to a minimum.
  2. it slightly increases the barrier to entry, but it's really just an npm publish command for a plug-in author. For advanced plugins this would be a total win.
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
204
Forks
82
Avg merge
22h 27m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

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