Re: Plugin System

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 11:40:54AM +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 08:19, Bob Smith wrote:
> > On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 14:40, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > 
> > Been thinking about this some more. Why does this need to be implemented
> > as a plugin? The way each app uses the data source is different. So,
> > that code is app specific so it cant be shared.
> 
> libgda is not available on Windows. By using a plugin we can provide
> GNOME users extra functionality without having to port libgda to windows
> and without a huge pile of #ifdefs inside abiword.

I agree with Bob on this.  However, that view does not preclude the
use case Martin is suggesting.  It makes perfect sense to put the
abiword use of libgda into a plugin.  The question is whether or not
that code is so general that it can actually live in a 'stock'
plugin offered by libgoffice, and that seems implausible to me.

Every plugin we've got in gnumeric is specific to gnumeric, even the
language bindings.  As such I'll assume that the primary use case
will be for app specific plugins, rather than goffice wide shared
plugins.