[MonoDevelop] Thoughts about AddIns

[John Luke]

On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 13:55 -0400, Todd Berman wrote:

> > Yep, update is a good idea.
> > 
> 
> Well, with this we step into an interesting gray area.
> 
> Autoupdate would have to put the files somewhere. and since most
> installs will be rpm, and installed into /usr/lib/monodevelop/ the
> updater would need root permissions (You aren't running X as root, now
> are you?). This would mean either 1) the updater is a seperate app (not
> desirable imo) or 2) You run MD as root to update (also not desirable).
> 
> There are potential ways to workaround this, like allowing
> ~/.config/MonoDevelop/AddIns/ to be added to the AddIn tree so that
> newer versions there would supercede installed versions, but then you
> get into yet another updating concern, what happens when you have 0.3
> installed, put some 0.4 pieces into your ~/.config/ addin tree, then do
> a system upgrade to 0.5... the old pieces in the ~/.config/ tree would
> supercede and screw you.
> 
> basically any proposal to add in-app updating would have to provide a
> good way to handle that. It would also have to explain why this
> functionality is desired(/required). I can see its use in something like
> eclipse, which has a lot of third-party plugins, but right now, we don't
> have that issue.
> 

As Mike said update would be something for later, post 1.0 for them so
don't worry yet.  The right way to do it, if it's ever even done would
be to prompt for the root password if you didn't have permission to
write to the AddIn directory. Having ~/.config/AddIns is too much of a
mess in my opinion.

As for just installing or managing addins you also need permission to
write to the addin folder, so this may be required just for the simple
Addin scout.  It's really an implementation detail that can be looked at
later, no need to shoot it down before its been fully cooked or
proposed. This is the discussion before the proposal.