Re: Rise of the Plugins

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 18:55 +0200, chuchi wrote:
> I think like you.
> 
> Gnome (and not gnome projects) needs uniform all the functionality of
> all application making easy to use a common plugin GUI, uniform
> snippets plugins (gedit plugin) and then I can use it in my editor or
> into anjuta.
> 
> I think there are a lot of copy/paste instead of create a library and
> share it with all.
> 

I think it should be investigated but I'm not too hopeful in this
respect, there may be a level of copy/paste code going on but usually
a plugin is a bridge between a code module and either an optional
backend or possible extention module - the very nature of the core
module always defines what kind of functionalities should be implemented
by a backend, and what core functionalities should in turn be shared
with a backend plugin - even extention plugins (I'm thinking gimp addons
for example) will have specific argument types:

   output *plugin_execute (input *);

some are more complex than just a menuitem "fire me up and let me
dance" kind of plugin - IMO there is no way at all to generalize
this.

The things I see offhand that all plugin architectures have 
in common are:
   - a struct or object that the plugin implements
   - versioning information/guards
   - some cores provide a struct/object to the plugin for
     the plugin to use as an api (instead of just binding to
     the available symbols in memory) the gecko api comes to mind.

So is copy/paste really whats going on ? I doubt it, more like
following a well known paradigm and implementing very custom
code around it in very different ways, is there a way that we
can enforce a nice and well thought out plugin paradigm and
distribute/share it in a library ? ... worth the investigation
I still think.

Cheers,
                    -Tristan