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

[Michael Foord]

On 02/08/2010 01:03, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> 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
>    

I agree it sounds like an important feature - a point of control for the 
user or the system as you said on irc. I still don't think unittest 
*can* use it, but I'm quite happy with the fact that if a user 
deactivates a plugin through distutils2 then it is no longer *available* 
to unittest.

Michael

-- 
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