[wp-hackers] Plugin zip problem on wordpress.org

[Callum Macdonald]

+1 - Sounds good to me - Callum.

Michael D Adams wrote:
>> I think the consensus from people who responded is that adding the 
>> option to specify a subdirectory would be useful. It's backwards 
>> compatible, I don't see any down side nor have I noticed any objections.
>
> Well - there's always a down side: figuring out how it should work, 
> time in making it happen, documenting it, etc. More importantly, one 
> goal of the WordPress Plugin Directory is to make downloading and 
> installing experience for all plugins to be as consistent as possible 
> for the user. How do we ensure that experience is the same for plugins 
> using the subdirectory feature and for those that don't?
>
> There are however compelling reasons to offer such a feature. So let's 
> talk about how it should happen.
>
>
> Situation:
>
> I have a plugin called Wonder Plugin hosted at 
> http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wonder-plugin/. Suppose I have files that 
> look like this:
>
> /wonder-plugins/tags/2.1/readme.txt
> /wonder-plugins/tags/2.1/tests.php
> /wonder-plugins/tags/2.1/release/wonder.php
>
> And a readme.txt file *in trunk/* with the following line:
>
> Stable Tag: 2.1/release
>
>
> Proposal:
>
> The Plugin directory will package the zip file from the release/ 
> subdirectory of the 2.1 tag rather than zipping up everything.
>
> The zip file will contain the readme.txt file as well, even though the 
> readme.txt file is not in the release/ directory. (If there is another 
> readme.txt file in the release/ directory it will get *overwritten*).
>
> The zip file will contain all of those files (release/* and 
> readme.txt) wrapped in a directory called wonder-plugin/. So the 
> contents of the zip will look like:
>
> wonder-plugin/readme.txt
> wonder-plugin/wonder.php
>
> The zip file will be named wonder-plugin.zip.
>
> Zip files from other tags (downloaded from the "other versions" link, 
> e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/download/) will 
> contain the *entire* SVN tree. Why? We determine the "packaging 
> subdirectory" from the readme file in trunk/. The directory structure 
> can change between tags, so we can't know from trunk/readme.txt what 
> the right thing to do is for any tag but the stable one. We could 
> parse each tag's readme.txt, but I'm not convinced that's useful for 
> plugin authors or users. This is *inconsistent*. Is that bad?
>
> If the plugin had specified Stable Tag: trunk/release, everything 
> above would apply with the trunk/ dir taken to be the stabel "tag" 
> dir. (Stable Tag: trunk is equivalent to not including a Stable Tag 
> field. Including it is best practice.)
>
> If the plugin had no subdirectory in its Stable Tag field, the entire 
> tag directory is packaged in the zip (this is what happens now).
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Mike
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