[Distutils] API for finding plugins

[Kevin Dangoor]

On 2/7/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 06:59 AM 2/7/2006 -0500, Kevin Dangoor wrote:
> >To date, I've just been hunting among the installed packages for
> >things that satisfy particular entry points. I'm not certain I
> >understand the intersection between plugins here and entry points. (If
> >this is already documented in the setuptools documentation, feel free
> >to say that...)
>
> The difference is that plugins of this kind are installed into an
> application instance-specific directory or directories, rather than to the
> default sys.path.  Chandler plugins, for example, might be installed in a
> user's profile directory, much like Firefox extensions.
>
> The key here is that an application wants to scan its plugin directory or
> directories and figure out what eggs can safely be added to sys.path, thus
> making their entry points available.  In theory, if the application uses
> easy_install to set up and configure its plugins, everything would be fine
> of course, but an application's plugin directory isn't normally a "site"
> directory; i.e., it's not going to support .pth files and so can't have a
> "default" version set for each package.

Ahh, OK. Your explanation makes the difference clear. I'm pretty sure
that TurboGears doesn't need plugins (in this terminology) yet, but I
could imagine that some TurboGears apps may like to use plugins (much
like Trac does).

Kevin