[FR-devel] Project plugin thoughts - Was : remove the plugin-menu-item when a plugin is stopped

[Curt Hibbs]

I haven't had time to think through all of this with any depth, but my 
overall reaction is that this looks pretty good. I don't see any hidden 
gotchas.

Curt

Laurent Julliard wrote:
> Günter Glück wrote:
> 
>> hi,
>>
>> sorry for beeing so silent in the past time.
>>
>> now i'm view at the plugin-manager plugin i started to develop in the 
>> past.
>>
>> this plugin should make it possible to start and stop plugins on 
>> demand over
>> the plugin-manager-panel.
>>
>> so i search for the right method to remove a menu-item from the 
>> tools-menu.
>>
>> sorry if this is a silly question :-)
>>
>> günter
>>
> 
> Günter,
> 
> Nice to see you again on the FR-devel list. It's good that you are
> restarting the work on the projet manager and, as a matter of fact I
> have been giving some thoughts to it (again!) recently.
> 
> So here is where I am and may be it's time to restart the discussion
> on the subject between all of us.
> 
> First thing is to think about what a projet is. The conclusion I came
> to is that a project in the FreeRIDE sense is nothing else than a
> collection of properties spread over the various active plugins that
> define the state of FreeRIDE. An example of this is that A project has
> a collection of opened files which are properties of the editpane plugin.
> 
> So then the next question is: are all properties related to a project
> context? The asnweer is clearly no. There are properties that belong
> to the plugin itself regardless of the project you are working on. As
> an example it's very likely that you want the editor behavior to be
> the same whatever project you work on.
> 
> So what I was thinking of doing is the following:
> 
> a) rework the plugins so that their properties are stored either in
> the 'plugin' slot or the 'project' slot depending on their scope. This
> is easy to do.
> 
> b) With this in place the project manager plugin will be responsible
> for loading, saving and creating projects.
> 
> Saving a project simply means
>   - the project manager plugin collects all 'project' property slots
> in all running plugins and store them in the .frp file (the freeride
> project file)
> 
> Loading a new project means
>   - the project manager plugin reads the .frp file, and calls each
> plugin in turn to pass the corresponding project property slot
> 
>   - each plugin must put in place this new project properties and act
> accordingly.
> 
> Creating a new projet means
>   - from the project manager plugin, create a project property slot
> from a template (which can be different depending on the project type
> e.g. FXRuby application, Console application, Rails application...)
> 
>   - each plugin must put in place this new project properties and act
> accordingly.
> 
> So now the question is: what does 'act accordingly' means ? After
> looking carefylly at the existing code it occured to me that
> restarting a plugin by calling the stop and then start method was
> probably not the right thing to do. The main reason is because the
> start code has a lot to do with bringing the plugin to life and also
> creating it UI, menu entries....
> 
> It seems quite obvious that there is no need to do this again when a
> new project is loaded. For instance for the editpane plugin, loading a
> new projet simply means a) closing all the opened files of the current
> project and b) load all the files of the new project. That's about all.
> 
> Consequently my suggestion is to add a new class method to the plugins
>  that would be in charge of doing this. We could call the method
> project_properties=, restart or reload are not really good names
> because start and load already exist and they do something not related
> to what we are trying to achieve here. Suggestions are welcome..
> (refresh?
> 
> So, Günter, while it is an interesting exercise to write the 'plugin
> manager' plugin, I think it is not necessarily what we need for the
> project manager.
> 
> Comments from everybody is welcome.
> 
> Laurent
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