Re: plugin dependencies

Andrew Kaspick
Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:55:55 -0000

Adding something like :all is not an ideal fix as this doesn''t allow
any type of error reporting for the user that dependent plugins are
missing or possibly being loaded incorrectly.  I mentioned something
similiar in my OP.

Back to why I brought this all up in the first place...

Somebody was using my plugin that I wrote to improve the
in_place_editor code.  The user was using edge rails.  The
in_place_editor code was recently moved to a plugin, so now my plugin
stopped working and the user contacts me that it doesn''t work in edge
(which is to expected with edge code), but the user was not aware that
the original rails code had been moved to an external plugin and
neither was I.  It turns out that simply installing the new "core
plugin" fixes the problem (since the alphabetical ordering was ok in
this case), but the user had no indication that this was the problem
and neither did I initially.  I''m sure this will become more of a
common case in the future (especially with the release of rails 2).

If there was a method to report back some sort of debug information to
the user informing them they need to install the additional plugin
(and possibly modifying the config.plugins) property that would save
many headaches I''m sure along with saving time to support users on how
to fix the issue that some feedback from the plugin could easily do.
I''m not saying that a full error reporting system be implemented, that
could easily be accomplished with a simple print statement, but the
functionality to find out if there''s a dependency problem would be
required.

Using :all would be better than what''s currently there which is
basically and all or nothing approach to loading plugins, but I think
it''s far from ideal.

What do you mean by "load order changing"?  I''ve missed the
details of
this somewhere.

On 9/19/07, Michael Koziarski <michael@koziarski.com>
wrote:
>
> We''re definitely not going to go down the route of a massive
> dependency system of our own.  Rubygems does this kind of thing
> already, and perhaps we just need to go down the plugins-as-gems
> approach.
>
> Either way,  I''d be open to applying a patch to add :all to
> config.plugins or the load order changing,  but that''s about it
for
> 2.0.
>
> --
> Cheers
>
> Koz
>
> >