[CF-Devel] Crossfire plugins

[Mark Wedel]

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      I don't understand why it should make the development process more fragmented
     
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      that it is now. The plugin system simply means that you can develop your own
     
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      piece of code without bothering about what others are doing/have done. I think
     
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      the increased freedom in the development process allowed outweights the fact
     
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      that anyone could go in a different direction - this is already more or less
     
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      the case.
     
     
 This probably isn't that big a deal.  How more options for people to develope
results in a final problem is difficult to say.

 For example, if you have 20 developers working on the core aspect, and 5 go to
work more or less exclusively on a non standard plugin, that reduces the core
developers to 15.

 OTOH, if you have 20 developers, 5 go to work on a nonstandard plugin, but you
pick up 15 more that maybe spend 50% of the time on some plugins that they can
now do and are interested in, and the other 50% on the core aspect, this comes
out ahead.

 I can't look into a crystal ball and see what will happen.  Time will tell the
end result.


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      Isn't it already the case for the core code ? If you make some big changes in
     
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      the core (say, in object structure for example), it implies that quite a lot
     
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      of code needs to be changed anyway (and I don't even speak about the
     
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      clients-update problem here). And don't forget the plugin interface is based
     
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      on an interface less dependent of the server/crosslib internals (by the use of
     
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      hooks). Maybe I could go further on the abstraction layer problem to prevent
     
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      compatibility break ?
     
     
 This I suppose depends on the natures of the plugins and their size.  Due the
the plug in nature, I could potentially see many more plugins than might
otherwise get put into the core code.  Who is responsible for updating all these
potential plugins (person making the change to the core, person responsible for
each plugin?)  Once again, its impossible at this time to see if this will
happen or not.