[anjuta-devel] libpeas

[Sébastien Granjoux <seb sfo free fr>]

Hi Abderrahim,

Here some comments about the discussion on libpeas in bug 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=621676


I think that exporting IAnjutaEditor* interfaces instead of a 
GtkTextView is much better at least for Anjuta needs. So I'm agree that 
it will be difficult to have the same plugin for gedit and anjuta. You 
can still put in the same shared library file both interfaces and have 
some common code. But anyway, in this case, we don't need to change 
anything in anjuta to make it compatible with gedit.


As Johannes, I think that moving all *Manager plugins in the core is a 
bad idea.


Then, even if libpeas calls functions using a more complex syntax, we 
can still use it. Basically an Anjuta plugin is a shared library with 
only one function named "anjuta_glue_register_components" which register 
additional GLib types. Then the plugin manager just creates the plugin 
objects on demand using standard GLib function (g_object_new).

So, we can call peas_extension_call (ext, IANJUTA_TYPE_LOADER, 
"anjuta_glue_register_components"); to register all needed types and all 
the remaining code stay the same in Anjuta. This can be done in a 
plugin, so we can have a libpeas loader.


I suppose that libpeas provides more services, like parsing .plugin file 
(this file contains meta information like plugin name, implemented 
interfaces...) checking dependencies and so on. I think this part is the 
main function of libpeas but it is independent from the language used by 
the plugin. I don't know how easy it will be to replace the 
corresponding code in Anjuta but the gain is null for the user and I 
think quite small for us as the code is already working and don't really 
need improvements for the moment.


Writing a loader for javascript or valua plugin should be quite easy. We 
just need to write a new loader plugin that will load the 
javascript/vala code and call the javascript/vala function 
anjuta_glue_register_components. The issue is that we need working 
bindings supporting interface functions and callbacks.


Regards,

Sébastien