[Users] HEADS UP for CVS/snapshot users: big changes

[Colin Leroy]

Hi,

Three parts to this email: first, architectural changes impacting how
you download and build your plugins of choice; second, plugins being
dropped because they're mostly useless.

FIRST, ARCHITECTURAL CHANGES:

Since a few years, the number of extra-plugins was becoming a
burden on both Paul (release manager) and the translators team, who had
to translate a lot of files. Releasing took a full day for Paul.

At start, extra-plugins were meant to allow new developers restricted
CVS access to only their code and not the rest. History showed that all
new plugins writers have been trustable enough that this restriction
possibility was never used.

These fact, and also the fact that these extra plugins are as
well supported as the rest of Claws Mail and never released
independently, prompted us to recently decide to merge all the extra
plugins into Claws Mail's core distribution and put them along the
other "core" plugins like PGP/Mime, Bogofilter or such.

Latest CVS now has all these plugins. Their build can be decided
with ./configure flags, with the usual "build if dependencies are
available" policy. That makes a whopping 27 plugins in the main
Claws Mail source.

This number can make it hard to spot an unbuilt plugin that one wanted
built, so the recap at the end of the configure phase details plugins'
status.

The extra-plugins CVS module is currently being cleaned up, with old
sources removed in order to avoid confusion.

Most of CVS and snapshot users will only have to remove some
extra plugins from their build scripts, and they'll be built
automatically from the core.

CVS users, don't forget to `cvs update -d` because CVS is so 20th
century it doesn't even download new directories by itself :)

This is it for the architectural changes.

SECOND, PLUGINS DROPPED
- Cachesaver has been dropped because it's immensely useless. It
  reflects the state of Claws Mail back in 2001 or 2002.

- Trayicon has been dropped because its features are
  entirely available in the Notification plugin, which is coded in a
  more modern manner and has more features.

- Dillo Viewer has been dropped because Dillo isn't capable of
  rendering most of today's HTML.

- GTKHtml2 Viewer has been dropped from distribution and not merged
  into Claws Mail's core because the Fancy plugin is based on a vastly
  superior rendering engine. GTKHtml2 Viewer is still in extra-plugins,
  but will not be released anymore apart in the Windows build until
  Fancy's been ported to Windows.

We hope everything will work fine with this new organisation.
-- 
Colin
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