[Python-Dev] PEP 376 proposed changes for basic plugins support

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 1:56 AM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> On 02/08/2010 00:46, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>
>> [snip...]
>>>
>>> I don't think that unittest would use a distutils2 (or pkgutil) supplied
>>> API
>>> for activation.
>>>
>>
>> But the discovery API you will use might just simply filter out
>> disabled plugins.
>>
>
> I did consider asking this but thought it was a silly question - there
> *must* be an API to get all plugins otherwise applications couldn't activate
> or deactivate them (or allow their users to do this) - and then how could
> users activate a non-active plugin? (I guess there could be private APIs
> that only distutils2 is supposed to use, or the script that you mentioned.)

yes, there will be a way to retrieve them all

...
> It sounds like it can fairly easily be bolted on as a new feature set later
> *anyway*, so dropping it for now simplifies the initial implementation.

but then we would be back to the problem mentioned about entry points:
installing projects can implicitly add a plugin and activate it, and break
existing applications that iterate over entry points without further
configuration. So being able to disable plugins from the beginning seems
important to me