Re: Plugin RFC

J.M. Maurer wrote:
>> 1) Ship a set of useful, fairly polished plugins
>> and
>>
>
> agreed++
>
>
>> 2) Statically link that set in. Other plugins could still be shipped
>> in an "abiword plugins" package, and modularly loaded at runtime
>>
>
> For fedora, I already include all (useful) already in 1 package. At the
> moment I include them all as a shared lib, but statically building them
> wouldn't really make a difference to any end-user.
>
Agreeing here with Marc - I think the pressure is on me to get
everything into 1 installer on Windows for 2.8 but I'd still like to,
for instance, be able to disable math if I don't have the fonts or
grammar if my computer is slow. I just made ubuntu packages where all
plugins that didn't bring in lots of dependencies are in the main
package, with the same effect as in fedora.
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I was wondering how 'our' PortableApps version is created now. Do they
> take our binary, or do they compile it themselves. If they just take our
> version, then there might still be some interest in shipping a very
> light version as well (ie, like we currently do it).
>
>
Pretty sure they take our binary and install the plugins that are
included (just ODT IIRC). I know they support (and document) how to
install more plugins (using our installers) into the AbiWord Portable
directory.
>> 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
>>
>
> For an end user, it won't matter at all where the size is located
> really.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> For non-en_US locales, I see a definite speed improvement though.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I'd rather see the issue properly analyzed, instead of "hoping it gets
> away after some random changes".
>
> Marc
>
>
>
>

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com
#282  +  (442) -  [X]
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As he lay there in bed
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was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;