[MonoDevelop] Ideas for an addin manager

[Jacob Ilsø Christensen]

Hi.

I think it would be a very nice feature to have. It is a bit
cumbersome to enabled addins in current MD.

And a few comments:

"Enabling/disabling of addins would require restarting MD. Doing it on
the fly would be really hard to implement with the current design":

It would be cool if we could do it though. Maybe we could do it for
some of the addins while others might require restarting MD.

"We need a way of specifying the dependencies of an addin in a
declarative way.":

Why would we need that? Can we just not examine the assembly as it is
to determine the dependencies. Also we might just try and instantiate
it inside a try/catch or are things not that simple?

/Jacob









On 7/4/05, Lluis Sanchez <lluis at ximian.com> wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> One of the good things of MD addins is that in most of cases they can be
> implemented in fully managed code, which means that the same binary can
> be safely distributed to any platform that runs MD. I'm writing here
> some ideas about how could we take advantage of this.
> 
> >From the user's point of view, I envision the following features:
>       * A dialog shows a list of addins installed in MD.
>       * The addins can be enabled / disabled.
>       * When the user enables an addin, MD checks that the dependencies
>         of that addin are installed in the system, and shows an error
>         message if they are not.
>       * Addins can be downloaded from internet. There is a list of
>         addins which are available for download. The list is taken from
>         a repository of addins. The user can register new repositories
>         by just adding new urls.
>       * Addins downloaded from internet can be easily updated when a new
>         version is published.
> 
> Now some technical notes:
>       * Enabling/disabling of addins would require restarting MD. Doing
>         it on the fly would be really hard to implement with the current
>         design.
>       * We need a way of specifying the dependencies of an addin in a
>         declarative way.
>       * An addin may depend on other addins.
>       * Because of the previous point, MD should take care of making
>         sure that addins can find the addin assemblies they depend upon.
>       * Some addins will have uncommon unmanaged dependencies, which
>         will need to be installed by using whatever system it's Linux
>         distribution is based on. This new addin management system would
>         not be so useful in this case, but I think that there are many
>         other cases in which it would be really useful.
>       * If an addin only has managed dependencies (for example, the boo
>         compiler), an option would be to package those dependencies
>         together with the addin.
>       * A repository of addins could be something as simple as an XML
>         file with the list of addins (and its dependencies and versions)
>         together with gziped assemblies.
>       * There would be an "official" MD repository of addins, with the
>         optional addins we are not currently shipping.
> 
> Any comment about this?
> 
> BTW, I don't think I'm going to implement this at short term, so if
> people agree that something like this is needed and somebody has some
> free time, feel free to take it, it shouldn't be too difficult to do,
> and looks like fun ;-)
> 
> Lluis.
> 
> 
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