Re: Plugin System

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 02:33:05PM -0700, Bob Smith wrote:
> 
> This is one of the things we have been discussing. Doing a single file
> plugin which would be slower, but caching the data so that only the
> first time the plugin is probed its slow. So, say, I add the foo.py
> plugin. The next time I run Gnumeric, the startup time is slow since it
> has to probe the new file and extract the metadata. This meta data is
> added to the plugins.cache (or whatever) file and then subsequent runs
> of gnumeric just read in the plugins.cache file since there are no new
> plugins. This makes adding new plugins easy and makes startup times
> quick other then the first time.

Ahh, I see what you mean.  However, the 'magic just in time caching'
of plugin data scares the bejeezus out of me on several levels.

1) Its a source of consistency problems, and permissioning issues
2) We still end up having to do the scan initially to see if
anything has changed, so the net win is small.

If we're going to do it I'd rather see a package/plugin installation
level operation that would update the list of available plugins in a
subtree.