[Kst] New way to build plugins ?

[Brisset, Nicolas]

Hi,

a colleague jsut came up to me and asked about plugins... When I fired
up my editor to show him how simple it was (I was still thinking about
the .xml / .c(pp) times) I saw something much more complicated than the
old C style plugins. Sure, it is still feasible but:
1) the docs in devel-docs are outdated
2) while a lot of people know enough C to write a small algorithm for a
plugin, far less know enough C++ to understand what to do here
3) it used to be possible to write plugins without having a KDE/kst
installation and pulling development headers (now at least
kgenericfactory.h is required)
4) a .moc file is autogenerated but for people not familiar with Qt/KDE
development that may look like black magic, and they will most likely
give up, at least without clear and up-to-date explanations
5) memory allocation is done via calls to resize() which wasn't the case
before and there may be other important differences worth mentioning
6) I am not sure it is still possible to build C-style plugins or
out-of-source-tree plugins

Having been a very active supporter of the move to the new plugin
architecture (for the custom dialogs possibility it offers) I won't
complain too much now, but I think a few words of explanation on how to
build a custom plugin would be good. This kind of flexibility is really
important, and one of the differentiating factors of kst... Maybe I have
just missed something, but I'd be glad to have an answer from Adam or
someone who's got a global picture on the subject !

Nicolas