Plugin API

[Albert Graef <Dr Graef t-online de>]

Hi everybody,

I've just finished writing a Gnumeric plugin loader for the Pure
programming language (http://pure-lang.googlecode.com/). Works great. :)
But I do have two issues with the plugin API which I'd like to discuss here.

First, building a plugin outside of the Gnumeric source tree is a bit
awkward, because the gnumeric-config.h and gnumeric-features.h headers
are needed to compile plugins but they aren't installed anywhere. So
right now I have to tell users to grab and configure the Gnumerics
sources to get these headers. Couldn't those two headers please just be
installed so that 3rd party plugin writers can rely on them? Should be
just a matter of changing the toplevel Makefile.am.

Second, the API to provide help information for plugin functions has
changed, which seems to make it quite a bit harder to provide quick help
information in scripting language plugins. Specifically,
GNM_FUNC_HELP_OLD and the arg_names field of the GnmFuncDescriptor
struct are gone. I'm sure that this was done on purpose ;-), but how are
we supposed to do this now? Looking at the sources of the Perl and
Python plugin loaders didn't help, AFAICS they haven't been converted to
the new help format yet. Any help on that would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr Graef t-online de, ag muwiinfa geschichte uni-mainz de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag