[qutebrowser] qutebrowser plugin API as student research project

[Florian Bruhin]

Heya,

(Stefan: Added you to the BCC just FYI, but if you feel like it, you
might want to subscribe to the announce-only mailinglist here:
https://lists.schokokeks.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/qutebrowser-announce
it's quite low-traffic, usually 0-3 messages per month)

I have some exciting news to share: Some of you might already have seen
my preparations some months ago, but now it's official: Until
mid-December, I'll work some 17h per week on qutebrowser, and get study
credits for it too \o/ (8 ECTS for the curious).

Some of that time will be spent on cleaning up qutebrowser's code base
to fix some long-standing issues, and the rest on starting work on a
plugin API. We decided to leave plugin packaging/distribution/loading
out of the picture, so the main focus is on creating a clean "internal"
plugin API and refactoring components in qutebrowser out of the core and
into "plugins".

However, once all that work is done and the plugin API has been
battle-tested a bit, I intend to first add the ability to load local
plugins from disk, and then at some later point add a way to manage
plugins from inside qutebrowser.

It's a research project ("Studienarbeit") which is basically intended as
the small brother of a Bachelor thesis to gather some experience. That
means there'll also be a lot of documentation at the end, which I
decided to write in English to give people something (hopefully) nice to
read at the end, for those of you who are into that :)

We decided to do things as much in the open as possible, so here are
some links if you want to follow along:

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/projects/3 to organize
qutebrowser issues relevant to all this.

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser-hsr-sa as a repository for
issues about the research project itself, and as a place for things like
the documentation and meeting minutes (those are in German though).

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser-plugins as a place for plugin
ideas and in the future, maybe curated plugins. Planning to look through
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 which has gotten
way too big, and open more fine-grained issues with notes there.

Currently the plan is to first look through (hopefully) all the open
PRs, and then go on with important refactoring tasks which will impact
the plugin API a lot. Looking forward! :)

Florian

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