[Kst] Re: Plugin Interface

[George Staikos]

On Tuesday 17 February 2004 06:31, claude mercier wrote:
> Even if not urgent, I think an end user, not like me, would understand
> better
> the thing you offer below than the arrays of pointors ...

   Ok from what I can tell, everyone is in one of two categories:
1) New proposal is better
2) New proposal is no better and no worse than the previous one

   Based on this, I think I should go ahead and implement it.

> >Is this solution enough added value
> >to justify breaking all existing plugins?
>
> The solution is good because, it matches the user defined interface
> (xml) to the plugin
> interface and make things easier to manage for end user.
> It has a drawback, one could think of a plugin which does nearly the
> same thing
> with two different interfaces working for both (2 xml files and one C file)
> do we need this ? (definitivly not for end user)

   No we don't need to support this.

> >   In addition, do you think it would be useful to have "constructors" and
> >"destructors" for plugins?  For instance, there could be two symbols in
> >each .so that are used for this, say "create()" and "destroy()".  This
> > could also be specified in the XML file if you want different names.
>
> I missed the point here, dont understand the question.

  Your plugin could export a create() and destroy() function which would be 
called on loading and unloading, respectively, to do things like create 
lookup tables (for instance).

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/