Manual for managed plugins in beta/github OpenCPN?

[hreuver]

Is there already a manual section for the new (beta) plugin portal?


I tested with 2 plugins with mixed results.

I think the plugin portal works as it should, with the problem that I had some bad plugins. Not knowing how the system should behave made my first impression a rather bad one (I had a lot of settings where almost all lead to crashes because of bad plugins).

At that point the choices between alpha, beta and master did not work as I expected. I assume "master" should contain the normal stable plugins (not yet available?).
"beta" should contain more release candidate plugins.
"alpha" should contain the latest bleeding edge plugins, I found no plugins (yet) in alpha.


The first bad plugin was probably an old version of opencpn-plugin-draw, which was solved by updating opencpn and the plugin to the latest github version.
The other bad plugin (oesenc) is probably caused by my platform (arm64).


I am waiting to see what will happen when users mix stable, alpha, beta and github plugins.


=== start off-topic ===
The managed plugin provided a armhf oeserverd (I think, result was something like "wrong binary"). The plugin provided from github (4.0.2) had an issue where it could not get a valid status for the USB dongle.

With a small patch the dongle check was bypassed and then the plugin worked as far as I tried. I did not make a key yet or assign a chart, so far I only checked the connection to o-charts.
=== end off-topic ===

[rgleason]

Manual as.it exists so far see Plugin Management
https://opencpn.org/wiki/dokuwiki/do...veloper_manual

Also see Alec Leamas more detailed wiki which is the github wiki for his opencpn repo, here
https://github.com/leamas/OpenCPN/wiki

[rgleason]

Master catalog is for proven plugins, alpha catalog is for more recent unproven plugins.

The linux version of plugin manager does not show the alpha catalog properly because it does not show meta-url records

I have made an issue about this which has had no response yet.

[hreuver]

Hm, that means that a link to a plugin is a manual link to github...
I'd prefer a system where the plugins "age" and are automagicaly copied in the more stable catalogs, but this might be less work.

[bdbcat]

re:
"I'd prefer a system where the plugins "age" and are automagicaly copied in the more stable catalogs,"


This is definitely the target solution. But this is all a 'work-in-progress", so far.


But seriously, thanks for experimenting. More eyes help the process...


Dave