[rkward-devel] a new approach to external plugins

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Wednesday 10 August 2011, meik michalke wrote:
> in summary, there's only two differences:
>  - a valid DESCRIPTION needs to be added (which is very easy, using
>    write.dcf(), which i just discovered for myself... see below)
>  - all the previous contets move unchanged as they are from the root
>    directory to "inst/rkward/"

all of that sounds quite straight-forward, and maybe you are right that this 
should eventually become the _only_ supported way to distribute add-on 
plugins. However, I am a bit reluctant to remove the GHNS-based approach just 
yet. Let's wait until we have all the bits in place, first.

> and looking at read.dcf(), would you think it might be easier to move the
> <about></about> section from the .pluginmap to a DESRIPTION-like format? in
> contrast to the XML coded info, it would at least be human readable,
> directly accessible from R, and much easier to produce (e.g. by a script),
> too:

Well, we need this information in the frontend, not in R (at least as far as I 
can see). Therefore I think that keeping it in XML, and inside the pluginmap, 
is still preferable. Also, the XML in the .pluginmap is going to stay, so I 
think moving some bits to a (new) DCF based file would not really help to make 
things more simple.

You mention producing this info by a script, and I think it would really be a 
good idea to have something roughly equivalent to package.skeleton() for 
rkward plugins, indeed. However, I think producing this in XML format is not 
really _that_ much harder to implement.
 
> to access information from an installed package:
> 
>   read.dcf(system.file(file.path("rkward", "DESCRIPTION.RKWard"),
>     package="myFoo"))

If we really do have a use for this (i.e. accessing this info from R), it 
should be easy enough to implement an equivalent based on XML.

Regards
Thomas
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