Plugin RFC

Abi's build system has had a few major improvements in the 2.7 era,
thanks largely to Rob and FJF.

1) The plugins live under the same "roof" as the rest of Abi
2) We can now have "default" plugins that always get built, like OpenDocument
3) The plugins can be statically linked into Abi. Startup time is
apparently the same as if no plugins were loaded at all.

Given this, I'm wondering if it might make sense *for our default
installers* to:

1) Ship a set of useful, fairly polished plugins
and
2) Statically link that set in. Other plugins could still be shipped
in an "abiword plugins" package, and modularly loaded at runtime

We would need to define that set (or at least criteria for what counts
as "useful" and "polished"). Something like ODF would probably count.
Something like AbiGimp
probably doesn't count.

A down-side of this is that the executable's size would be larger -
(roughly) sizeof(abiword.exe) + sum(sizeof(each_plugin)). However,
we're talking

Startup of Abi 2.6 on Windows is significantly slower than it used to
be. Wildly guessing, I think that this is due to some of our new
external dependencies and also to plugin loading.

Another benefit of this *may* be that we won't run into those "plugin
conflict" problems on Windows, where we can't load both plugin A and
plugin B at the same time. Again, this is speculation.

Thoughts?
Dom
Received on Thu Apr 10 17:59:33 2008