From: Douglas Neale <dneale@...936...>
I am not advocating that you adopt the Quark/Adobe solution in toto, I am just pointing out that the management of plugins is important and can thus influence the choice of architecture. The clashing of mutually incompatible plugins trying to use the same resources can be a real pain.
Douglas,
You can rest assured that we looked at these systems before designing our own -- but our's definitely isn't as mature. For instance, the only ways that you can build extensions for Inkscape is to compile them in or to use an external scripting language. The external scripting language doesn't tie into Inkscape directly, rather it processes an SVG document. We would like to get more powerful with this.
One way that we're doing this is Ishmal is implementing an interface to the SVG DOM in Inkscape. This should be an easily publishable interface that is standard and defined by the SVG specification. At that point we'll start doing loadable libraries as extensions.
Most of the other infrastructure required is already in place, although not tested that much. If you get a chance, I would love if you looked through it -- it would be nice getting some comments from someone who has worked with plug-ins in other programs.
--Ted