On 14-05-18 03:07 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Am 17.05.2014 03:43, schrieb Matthew Brush:
On 14-05-16 03:03 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
I think we want to maintain the ability to add loaders on our own,
With Peas you can, in fact it's designed with this purpose in mind, unlike the existing C-only loader.
If it's designed for that, why doesn't it expose that to its users? peas-plugin-loader.h is neither documented nor actually shipped, which makes me think they want to keep their plugin architecture private (subject to change). Given the GNOME community reputation that really worries me because we totally want to add loaders to libpeas.
Because I guess they assume that if you're going to write another language loader you're going to contribute it back to them. It would be like adding a Scintilla lexer into Geany's source tree without submitting it back upstream.
without depending on a 3rd party project. Especially for potentially
Meh, we depend on lots of 3rd party projects, several directly and many indirectly (see `ldd geany`).
Yes, but these generally don't affect the plugin API. When we make promises about the stability of the plugin API but depend on a 3rd party to fullfill that promise it's not an ideal situation. Especially when depending on the GNOME community as with libpeas.
This doesn't affect the plugin *API*. The only part that depends on how peas does it is in the .plugin ini files stuff. Nothing in the plugin's code even really has to know about Peas except maybe calling some type registration function, it's just GObject interfaces after that.
Peas seems to be quite popular in the community around our framework/UI toolkit and is used by several (if not dozens) of popular applications, which also means it's readily available in many popular distros' package repositories.
Even if Peas becomes unmaintained/unsupported, we could roll it into our own source tree and maintain it like we do ctags and tagmanager and we still wouldn't have had to write it ourselves :)
Yes I think that would be an acceptable solution once problems arise. libpeas is pretty tiny isnt it?
I appears to be after some brief looking at the source code.
creating a compat-loader for our existing plugins. It doesn't seem
After experimenting with this a bit, I believe it doesn't make much sense to make a compatibility layer because a) you still need basically the same code as the existing loader code, b) you would have to change/refactor/re-write lots of it c) you would still have two distinct ways to implement plugin interfaces, d) increases chances of breaking the existing loader/plugins and e) intertwining the two loaders would probably make it harder in the distant future to just drop one of them.
The problem is that libpeas demands a different method of making plugins available (.ini vs known symbols in the .so file). We definitely want only one method, even if it means transitioning the symbol method to the .ini file.
Yeah, this is actually a bonus for both C and non-C plugins. For one, it means Geany doesn't have to actually load the .so files for C plugins to read the plugin info, and additionally for not-C languages, it means the engine can get metadata about the plugin without involving the loaders (ie. no need to PyInitialize() the interpreter just to get metadata of unloaded plugin in Plugin Manager GUI).
That being said, if we make existing plugin loader use .INI stuff it will break all plugins, so maybe we could make some "opt-in" way that doesn't.
I don't think b) is true, and for e) it would make it actually simpler if the one loader is just a plugin of the other one.
For b) I mean mostly just shuffling around/re-factoring code. You're right about e), re-factoring it this way probably would improve its encapsulation/isolation.
libpeas readily supports this. Unless I'm missing something.
The loaders (except for C) are plugins, and the build-in ones are installed in /usr/lib/libpeas-<version>/loaders/ as .so libraries. For example, peas-plugin-loader-python.c contains:
G_MODULE_EXPORT void peas_register_types (PeasObjectModule *module) <-- as a regular plugin { peas_object_module_register_extension_type (module, PEAS_TYPE_PLUGIN_LOADER, PEAS_TYPE_PLUGIN_LOADER_PYTHON); }
I found that too. But this is not public and not documented. It's also not installed to /usr/include/libpeas-1.0.
Yikes! Free Software not properly documented! :)
It's not just a case of bad docs here. In this case it means it's not documented because it's private to libpeas, i.e. an implementation detail. For the same reason the peas-plugin-loader.h is not installed/distributed.
While it has a plugin architecture for loaders it doesn't seem designed to allow for 3rd party loaders.
As above, I presume the idea is that new loaders should be contributed back upstream.
Since we want plugin authors to be able to create loaders we need something that's stable and documented.
Then why do you want to write our own libpeas into the existing C plugin loader? It will (at least for some time) be buggier, and less widely tested/used/maintained (ie. only by us), take lots of extra effort, not automate the bridge between core and the plugins' language, probably be less well-documented, and after all, the end result would most-likely provide an inferior experience for non-C plugin authors.
I do not want to actually write that. However, I'm not convinced of libpeas yet (especially because if the .ini aspect), and then there's no alternative left. It only has to work well for us so I think the maintainance effort is manageable (and we'd have more control).
I think you're under-estimating the effort required, even not including the proxy plugin changes you want to add in as discussed originally. The (reverse) bindings stuff to call out to the non-C plugin languages, the work involved in setting up their interpreters, and only loading them when actually needed, a way to find meta-info about them without loading them (and their interpreters), and probably much more (I guess just look at libpeas source, most of it would have to be written, presumably).
But if libpeas can actually help us I'm happy to adopt it. I really mean it.
I think it's a pretty good way forward without breaking existing loader and it also happens work nicely with adapting GObject-Introspection for auto-API-bindings, since that will auto-bind the peas extension points (reverse of API bindings), making it actually usable from non-C/GObject without extra work.
Cheers, Matthew Brush