[Texmacs-dev] Three specific suggestions for the TeXmacs community

[Darcy Shen]

From 2017-10-06 to now, I have committed 144 times for the 
texmacs/plugins sub-project.

Currently, there is a vague separator between the TeXmacs core and the 
TeXmacs community.

I suggest that we should make the core part and community part of 
TeXmacs clear. And make it easier for new TeXmacs developers to join our 
community.

Here are some specific suggestions:

## Suggestion 1: Entrance for the plugins

The Plug-ins is under the bottom part of 
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html, and it points to a 
guide for writing plug-ins.

I think we should improve the accessibility of the Plug-ins entrance, 
for example, a link labeled "Plug-ins" should be put at the top of the 
website (the right side of "Learn").

And it should points to the list of existing plugins for TeXmacs: 
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/plugins/plugins.en.html


## Suggestion 2: Plugins: Official support and community driven

Official support plugins should be distributed within TeXmacs and 
community driven plugins should be removed out of TeXmacs.

It is disappointing to find a plugin with documentation but not 
functional, or find a working plugin but without any documentation.


Which plugins should be official supported:

1. Easy to maintain, eg. Macaulay 2: we actually launch the `M2 
--texmacs` command

2. Math, eg. Maxima and Octave: as far as I know some people only use 
TeXmacs as a nice interface for Maxima

3. Graphics, eg. Gnuplot, Asymptote, Graphviz: TeXmacs depends on 
Gnuplot for plotting

4. REPL, eg. Python/Scheme: Python is a popular scripting language and 
pre-installed for most GNU/Linux


Which plugins should be community driven:

1. Plugins for commercial softwares: Matlab, Mathematics, Maple, ...

2. Non-scripting language REPLs: It would be complicated to package it 
if it is platform-dependent. And to support, we need extra steps to 
build the plugins when distributing TeXmacs.

3. More rules to be added.


## Suggestion 3: An official discourse forum

Last year, I set up the forum (http://forum.texmacs.cn/) in about 4 
hours. And for now, there are 61 users now.

I sugguest that we should migrate the forum to https://forum.texmacs.org 
. I am afraid that politics (or others) prejudice may make people away 
for the forum.

A discourse forum would be more user-friendly and search engine friendly.

I think there is no conflict on the mail list and the forum. It is a 
good idea to make the mail list and forum share the same topics, but it 
is no urgent.