TL;DR: I’m proposing that some of the new plugins we write for WordPress.org live in the official plugin repo, rather than the Meta repo.
I’m working on #meta187 and part of it is a modification to P2 to allow assigning a category to a new post. I created a plugin for it, and initially I was just planning on putting it in the Meta SVN repo, but since this is generic functionality — rather than something specific to WordPress.org — I started thinking about where the best place for it to live would be.
One of our goals it to open-source as much of WordPress.org as possible, and putting the plugin in the Meta repo would achieve that, but probably not in the most effective way. 99% of WP users and plugin developers aren’t aware that the Meta repo exists, so the code isn’t very visible. And if they wanted to get updates, they’d have to set it up as an svn:external, rather than just using the regular plugin update system.
So for the most part, the only people who would benefit from using it outside WordPress.org, or contribute back to it, would be other developers on the Meta team.
So instead, I’m thinking we should put it — and other plugins like it, in the future — into the regular WordPress.org plugin repository. That would give it much more exposure and would make it easy for others to use the plugin. The extra exposure would lead to more feedback from users and more contributions from developers.
We could add the wordpressdotorg user as a contributor to the plugin, to ensure the Meta team still has commit access to it if the original developer isn’t available.
What does everyone think about that?