I was wondering if there was a better way to decide which add-ons to support in the flatpak.
The flatpak can not support every add-on for more than one reason:
The size of the compiled package for Gramps and all possible add-ons would be a huge download. It is already huge, and then if the user doesn’t already have the right Gnome Platform already downloaded from flathub, that increases the number of large downloads for installation.
Some add-ons use abandoned projects for dependencies, or old versions of dependencies
Troubleshooting which dependency broke the compiling process, or the flatpak itself once it compiles, would become more difficult. This happens every point update already.
All packaged dependencies need to be kept up to date, but they must be tested before release because of potential conflicts, bugs upstream, or wrong versions of the dependency for the add-on might be used. That is why I don’t automate the dependency updates or even the Gramps point updates like has been suggested, because updates often cause something to break.
The current dependency packages compiled with the Gramps flatpak are for add-ons that I saw mentioned often on the Gramps subreddit when I was first working on the flatpak, or for add-ons that I want to use.
Is there a way to find out what are the most popular add-ons being downloaded?
The general approach is to include no add-ons whatsoever.
Let the user install what they want (when they want) via the plug-in Manager.
That said, I would suggest that you consider including the Isotammi Configuration add-on. It makes switching between the Gramps-Project add-on server and entirely different collection on the Isotammi server a bit more simple. Still not very intuitive but better than copying&pasting a URL. (ummm…Twice.)
Make certain that you don’t put them in the plugin folder of the main application. They need to be in the Gramps User Directory so that they can be updated without hassles.
It would be nice if the plugin manager only showed supported plugins for the platform. I’ll work on this in the new addon manager. (which reminds me to start work on this again).
I can’t think of a way of finding the most popular addons though. Perhaps a poll on this forum?
As a number of people have commented and or raised the issue directly with me via email here is a summary of what I know:
Question
Does the Gramps project know which addons are the most popular and are download statistics available?
Answer
Addon downloads are not tracked and there are no plans to track them due to privacy and technical issues (see below). Even if addon downloads where tracked it would only represent a small percentage of users who check for addons!
Question
Why?
Answer
Github counts downloads via its releases section page only for normal downloads of files. But not for the way Gramps addon downloads are done as they are binary files that only sit in a second git repository itself in a directory per grampsXX release called download and not on the addon releases page, this is no different to the way the gramps addons were downloaded from the previous sourceforge website.
Note that we do have an the "Headline News gramplet " addon that does poll the Gramps website and was originally causing an issue making the website slow and at sometimes of day stopping it altogether as it was polling too often (once an hour from everyone who happened to be running Gramps at that moment! This was an unintended way to get DOS’ed Denial-of-service attack - Wikipedia ) when I took over as website admin I investigated and tracked down and changed the polling period to once a every 24 hours (for current and previous versions of Gramps!), alot of people had installed it on the Dashboard !