[Amarok-devel] Plugins...

[Alexandre Oliveira]

So, some people think we should let almost everything be done as
plugins, I don't think I have to explain the idea, users repeat that
all the time, they basically want something like either firefox
extensions or foobar2000 plugins.
They allow plugins to change the way things work, the way they are
shown, pretty much everything.

However, first of all, Amarok has never been about extreme
configurability, and I personally don't think we should change this so
much.

Anyway, if we intend to have plugins, there's something we need to
discuss about: how will we make them work?
We'd have a big problem: binary compatibility. We can't expect distros
to package lots of plugins, especially some not developed for us. It
works great for the few media device plugins we had, for the engines,
and could work for database plugins as well, but as soon as it grows
to a very big number of plugins from different sources, it's just
insane.

Foobar doesn't have this problem, as it's windows only. Firefox pretty
much built a full framework. Its extensions are actually zipped files
that in the end contain some xml, javascript and some other stuff.
Qt seems to offer support for plugins, but AFAIK it doesn't solve the
binary compatibility problems at all, it requires both the application
and the plugins to be compiled on the same OS/compiler.