[vdr] Re: VDR Plugin System - First Step

[s.huelswitt@gmx.de (Stefan Huelswitt)]

On 11 May 2002 Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de> wrote:

> Ok, I'll make the ConfigDirectory available to the plugins.
> It will be up to them to make sure there are no name clashes, though.
> I still think the plugin config files should be kept in a separate
> directory, so maybe it would make sense to automatically append
> "/plugins" to the value of ConfigDirectory (and make sure that directory
> exists, once a plugin queries it). What do you think about this?

One common directory for all plugins? I don't have any problems
with that. And it would be up to every plugin author to create a
subdirectory for his files.

>> To clarify what my problem is: the MP3/MPlayer patch has dual
>> functionality. And I don't thing that this could be build within
>> on plugin. But both parts use nearly the same code and config
>> files.
> 
> But these two _do_ implement different functionality, don't they?
> Or will a user of the MP3 plugin *always* also want the MPlayer
> plugin, and vice versa?

>From the users view they are independent, but they share a common
code base. It would be a waste of resources to things two times
(not a big one, of course).

>> It would be nice, to have more than one plugin inside a shared
>> library and register all contained plugins after loading. e.g.
>> have a global AfterLoad() function which would call
>> RegisterPlugin() for every contained plugin.
> 
> I want to keep this interface simple, so there will be only exactly ONE
> plugin per library.

OK, I can live with that. :-)
I'll try to advertise this idea later again ;-)

>> Yes, but as the setup file layout is simple, some things a
>> difficult to store. And it would imply to have SetupMenu's for
>> all these things, which may be even more complicated.
> 
> You don't need setup menus for all the parameters you store in VDR's
> setup. Read the section "Setup parameters" in PLUGINS.html. You can have
> any number of setup parameters without even implementing a setup menu
> at all.

I have to thing about this. Currently I'm doing a major
restructuring of the mp3 code to allow different decoding
engines. The first plugin was only a quick hack to see how hard
if will be to get it working. And of course to give you some
feedback and to see if my needs are fullfilled. ;-)

> Version 1.1.1 brings a greatly simplified setup menu handling.

I see.

>> -Each plugin should have a house keeping function which is called
>> during VDR's own house keeping.
> 
> Ok, I can add that.

Fine.

>> -VDR shouldn't remove setup options from setup.conf which belong
>> to plugins not loaded at the moment.
> 
> That's the way it is.

Yes, I read that later on.

-- 
Stefan Huelswitt
huels@iname.com  | http://home.pages.de/~nathan