Legacy Plugins

The term Legacy Plugins refers to plugins installed without involving the Plugin Manager or any other part of the OpenCPN core. This was the only way to deploy plugins before the new Plugin Manager in 5.2.2.

Packages are deployed as NSIS installers in Windows, .img packages on MacOS and Debian .deb packages on Debian/Ubuntu. There are no flatpak legacy plugins. Users install these packages in the same way as OpenCPN and other programs are installed.

For visibility, plugin packages are published at https://opencpn.org/OpenCPN/info/downloadplugins.html.

Should there be a need to publish new legacy packages, Pavel (@nohal) or Dave (@bdbcat) should be contacted so the information at opencpn.org can be updated. The rules described for modern plugins applies also for legacy ones.

Both the Shipdriver and the Testplugin templates supports creation of legacy packages.

Legacy plugins are installed in system directories which typically are read-only for regular users. For this reason, installation requires root or administrator privileges.

The Plugin Manager installs plugins in directories which could be modified by a regular users. Legacy plugins are listed, but cannot be modified.