Every Door OSM Editor

8.0-alpha2 has just been published! For regular users, it adds a search bar to the navigation pane. For plugin authors, it allows customizing fields. I've made a Wikidata plugin!

https://github.com/Zverik/every_door/releases/tag/v8.0-alpha2

Plugin: https://plugins.every-door.app/wikidata_fields

How to write plugins in Dart: https://pub.dev/packages/every_door_plugin

@mnalis I have a strict deadline to finish the project I've got a grant for. And I have to choose between publishing 8.0 on time and standing against corporations feeding on open source. And it really looks like corporations might win this time. (I don't dislike you trying to help, I was just startled by "congrats, but here's a ton new work you need to do if you want to continue", and I'm buried under so much backlog, I hate everything unexpected coming my way.)

@mnalis I mean, here I'm owning the code and can publish it anywhere however I want, but the moment I choose GPL, I cannot. And to own the code again, I need to engage in a long quest to track all the dependencies and their dependencies to make sure there's no binary blobs anywhere, and if there are, spend precious time rewriting the code around that. I understand GPL purists — I was a bicycle safety purist and an OSM purist many years ago — but that's certainly not a way to drive adoption.

@mnalis I understand you want to advance your cause (to have the apk published on f-droid) and to share the knowledge of GPL intricacies. Thanks. But also this is exactly the kind of talk that pushes developers and users off copyleft licenses. Like, okay, I understand, f this, back to ISC and never touching GPL again. Also I feel that is not true, but I am not a lawyer and cannot prove it, only if by pointing at various GPL libraries included in firmware of some appliances.

@acidbong@cupoftea.social I mention "or later version" in every source file and readme, but I could not understand from the website how to state this in the license.

@mnalis Not yet, and the alpha is not officially out :)

Starting with 8.0-alpha2, Every Door is now licensed under GPL v3.

None of the libraries, including those required to make plugins, are affected. It's just for users of the editor source code.

Doing my tiny part.

@mnalis I want to tackle this! Apparently introducing the new caching package was a mistake, which I now need to roll back. Will probably work on this in February.

Phew. The first stage of code-based plugin support is done.

https://github.com/Zverik/every_door/releases/tag/v8.0-alpha1

There is a sample experimental plugin in the repo to check this, which shows Panoramax photos. You can find its source in the repo for the plugin environment:

https://github.com/Zverik/every_door_plugin

Super tired, hoping to do the next stage by the mid-January, and release 8.0 in late February.

@bart And to add a context to the thing I'm doing, here's a blog post from AppFlowy about trying to use the same dart_eval to implement plugins (and failing badly): https://appflowy.com/blog/dont-try-to-load-code-dynamically-in-your-flutter-app-its-terrible I could not find anything else on those packages, implying nobody else has reached production either.

@bart What could have helped was me not having a day job to focus on the Dart internals and integrations. That was my plan originally. I left my old job to work on ED full-time. But as I explained in detail in my Russian-language DevClub talk, taking my salary and estimating the grant milestones by it was a huge mistake, which sent me to a debt hole. I had to rapidly find a new job this Summer to support my family, which means now I'm awake till 1am to make any progress on those plugins.

@bart Technically, there is dart_eval: a compiler from Dart to bytecode, and a runtime for executing it. I use it for packaging and distributing plugins. It's an amazing and complex package. Alas it has only two contributors who understand how it works. Because making compilers is hard. And their GitHub timelines look like this. Which means, in addition to just using this package and overcoming its bugs, I also have to understand it to fix and improve things, and it would take months.

God this dart_eval stuff is exhausting. The compiler and runtime are works of art, but with so many holes due to almost non-existent usage. Looks like Every Door will be the first Flutter app ever to have proper programmable plugins.

4 packages wrapped, 7 to go. 100500 lines of code to be generated and reviewed. Hoping to have something by next week ugh.

Thanks for @NGIZero@mastodon.xyz for supporting this, but I have absolutely miscalculated the effort lol.