KTextEditor Plugins

[Milian Wolff]

On Saturday 21 December 2013 22:49:42 Christoph Cullmann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> during the last 10 years, close to zero usable plugins did show up for
> KTextEditor. The few existing that are useful, would be better merged into
> the part, instead of having the whole code around to load plugins, manage
> them, ...
> 
> For KF5, I would remove the KTextEditor plugin interface completely.
> 
> It was brought up, that this kills the possibility to have plugins shared
> between Kate / KDevelop.

<snip>

I agree that sharing would be a cool thing to have eventually - but it should 
not be a priority.

Rather, I'd argue along a different route on why you should keep - and improve 
- the existing API, rather than ditching it.

A plugin API allows for much faster experimenting with new features, similar 
to what Sven mentioned. I don't need to create a "fork" of Kate in a branch to 
try out a new feature e.g. New functionality can also first be tested easily 
by interested people before then integrating it.

>From a software design view you also need some kind of interface internally 
anyways. If you spent the extra bit of effort to design it well, you just gain 
and don't loose anything. Note how we do this in KDev* land - _everything_ is 
a plugin. And we don't offer any ABI guarantees (except for within the 
lifetime of a given X.Y release). You could do the same. This actually would 
also "help" you to get new useful plugins into Kate codebase. As soon as the 
code resides there, people who break the API need to adapt these places. So 
there is a good driver to upstream code.

Anyhow, I'm starting to ramble off - I too think we should discuss this during 
the sprint.

Cheers
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de