[anjuta-devel] Adding some filtering mechanism for plugin

[Sébastien Granjoux <seb sfo free fr>]

Hi all,


In order in implement the GNOME IDE, we will have to completely hide 
some plugins or a part of them. I propose the following:


1. GNOME IDE will start by running anjuta with a new command line option 
allowing to select a different default profile. So you will load by example
  /usr/share/anjuta/profiles/gnome.profile
and
  ~/.cache/anjuta/gnome.profile


2. At that point you have loaded a different set of plugins. One of them 
could be a gnome plugin. This gnome plugin could have no user interface 
but will define some values in the shell and configure anjuta.


3. We need make the plugin manager considering only plugins fitting in 
some categories. The goal is to avoid proposing additional choices to 
the user. We will be able to remove experimental or complex plugins from 
the GNOME IDE. We have to add an additional attribute to each plugin to 
define the category. The gnome plugin above will define which categories 
are considered by the plugin manager.


4. The gnome plugin can define some values in the shell allowing other 
plugins to adjust their behavior. By example the project wizard should 
hide all project templates not related to the GNOME platform. This can 
be used by any plugins.



These changes are quite minimal and doesn't really change the core. We 
will have to define some shell variables and several plugins have to be 
adapted.


Another solution could be to change the profile format adding a keyword 
to define a value to filter plugins in order to make the plugin manager 
taking care of all this. Moreover this configuration has to be available 
to other plugins. This could avoid the need of a gnome plugin but it is 
a more important change in the core so I prefer the first approach. What 
do you think?


Regards,

Sébastien