[Qt-creator] Request advices for Qt Creator plugin developers to adopt API changes easily

[André Pönitz]

On Wed, May 08, 2019 at 11:40:31AM +0800, Vincent Hui wrote:
> Hi André,
> 
> Thank you for your advice.
> 
> Does that mean there is a refactoring tool that can adapt pulgins to API
> changes easily?

No there isn't.

The point is that for in-tree plugins some of the operations cause
practically no extra effort in some cases (e.g. some global renaming
doesn't really take notice on how many files are affected), and other
more manual scale more or less linearly with the number of plugins.

Together with the more or less constant overhead for creating and handling
the patch etc this means that the extra effort for an additonal
in-tree plugin is not *that* big.

For out-of-tree plugins the dominating factor is the patch handling in
the separate repo plus e.g. the effort to find out what actually
changed in the code. Together's usually much bigger than the code
adaption itself,

> I want know how plugins can get mechanical adapted to API
> change.

>From the outside it looks mechanical :-p

Andre'