[Geany-devel] geany-plugins depends on GIO

[Lex Trotman]

On 18 November 2010 10:16, Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
> Le 17/11/2010 23:09, Lex Trotman a écrit :
>> On 18 November 2010 03:36, Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> But they don't.  Not even all the plugins in Geany-plugins.
>>
>>>
>>>> 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?
>>>
>>
>> ATM how does an older plugin know that a new API is compatible unless
>> its been re-compiled??
> Well, if the API is there it can guess it's compatible, can't it? So as
> a C think if all plugin's symbols are resolved, it should work.

Yes but it can only know its there at compile time, and I'm not so
sure its a good idea to assume compatibility.

>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> I guess I'm more thinking that a new plugin feature won't be available
>> if it needs a feature that an older Geany doesn't support rather than
>> removal of existing features.
> Hum... yes, it is what I thought: given version V of Geany and version
> V' of the plugin, if user wants feature F that exists in version V' of
> the plugin, she has to upgrade her Geany to version V''.
>

Yes, we can't get around that, but ATM the plugin has no way of also
working with the previous version of Geany albeit without feature F.

>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> But ATM how does a plugin check that without being re-compiled?
> What what what? :D
> If a plugin compiles with version 0.18 and Geany doesn't detect a
> problem when comparing the ABI version it was built against, it IS
> compatible, no? And if the same plugin is compiled against Geany 0.19
> (assuming the ABI hasn't changed), it will still work with Geany 0.18...

Yes, but ANY change to the API/ABI even in areas that the plugin
doesn't use changes the version and makes the plugin incompatible with
older Geany.

Cheers
Lex

>
> Regards,
> Colomban
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