[Geany-devel] geany-plugins depends on GIO

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 17/11/2010 02:17, Lex Trotman a écrit :
>> It would need the plugin to something like "dynamically load Geany",
>> while assuming that Geany has an unstable API. This is IMHO really
>> complicated to deal with correctly, and I don't think that not having to
>> recompile a plugin is a sufficient gain for such a pain.
> 
> Recompiling is not (much of?) a pain for us developers, but it is a
> pain for other people who use Geany for non-C development.  They might
> not even have a C development environment, especially on Windows.
> Using Geany or plugins should not be dependent on being able to build
> it.
Under a Linux distribution, it is most likely a non-power-user is using
it's distribution's packages for both Geany and plugins, and the
distribution should take care of such things.
Under Windows, I don't think that upgrading plugins from a binary
installer is much work for somebody that upgrades it's Geany.

An I personally feel quite OK about plugins for a software to evolve
together with the software. But it's my opinion.

> The static version dependency means that either plugin development is
> stalled if it needs newer API, or older versions of Geany are not
> supported.
> 
> In fact even if no new features are used, a new geany_plugins release
> will no longer run with an old version.
Why? AFAIK as far as the Geany ABI hasn't changed, it should still work
if the plugin depend on a compatible API number, shouldn't it?

> To support older versions of Geany, plugin devs need to maintain
> multiple versions of their plugin and backport bugfixes, lotsa work
> and doesn't fit into geany_plugins combined releases.  I'm not talking
> about very old versions of Geany, the problem happens immediately at
> release of a new version.  Geany maintains compatibility with
> *ancient* versions of GTK, why then does it require itself to be the
> latest version?
Well, well, well...
I don't really feel good with the idea of a plugin that removes a
feature of itself when running with some versions of Geany. I don't
think it is easily understandable for users that to get a feature of a
plugin they got to upgrade Geany. But well, why not.

But does new API really matters? If a plugin writer wants to keep being
compatible with old Geany versions, she just have not to use new API --
as far as the ABI hasn't changed.

>> I personally think that protecting code with something like
>>  #if GEANY_CHECK_API_VERSION(421)
>>  ...
>>  #endif
>> is enough.
> 
> Yes if you are compiling.
> 
>> Saying this makes me remember that Geany uses a macro for each function
>> in the plugin API, so it is actually already possible to do a similar check:
>>  #ifdef a_geany_function
>>  ...
>>  #endif
>>
>> Well... this gives lot of stuff to think about :D
> 
> Yes, isn't it past your bedtime again??
No, but close to it :D

Regards,
Colomban