libgnomeoffice* plugin management

[Sven Herzberg <herzi gnome-de org>]

Hi,

  I'm currently looking for plugin system that I can use for my
presentation application [1]. I took a look at the libgnomeoffice plugin
system [2] which looks quite nice for me. I had some objections and just
want to keep them here for discussion, so flame me:

1. There hasn't been any release (thus making it hard to add even a
versioned dependency)

  not hard to fix

2. Plugin definitions are not translatable

  we should include translation for plugin description in the XML file
(like we do with GConf schemas) so the library can provide a
translation.

3. There seems to be no definition of a plugin search path but the path
for xml definitions seems to be hardcoded

  This makes it quite hard to keep clean systems like /usr being only
for distribution stuff. I'd like to have a small configuration file (or
GConf key) so admins/users can specify paths for themselves. The GConf
solution would make it very easy to have an admin specifying some sane
defaults and some users can overwrite it for themselves (e.g. I can use
different plugins as different users, stable ones when showing
presentations, unstable ones when developing)

4. It depends on libgda

  Unfortunately not every application will need to depend on GDA. Read
more in the next section.

5. The project's structure seems to be a bit blocking

  I think that services should be specified as GInterfaces that can be
implemented by my own code, so I cannot run into a case when I want to
subclass one of my classes to implement a service.

  Services might be provided as loadable plugins as well, so we end up
with one base service and all other ones deriving from them. This makes
it easy to let interfaces depend on other ones. This way we can depend
on GDA optionally to provide the DataService and applications that build
plugins can check for this module at compile time (enabling a small
build for developers and good module splitting for distributors).

Regards,
  Sven

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/criawips
[2] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-office

PS: Does anyone here know projects that already use libgnomeoffice? I
don't think there are any as Malcom was mentioning it for conglomerate,
but configure.in doesn't mention it.