Inkscape will have a command accessible from its menus for reloading the entirety of the registry. This provides a mechanism for the user to access newly-installed extensions without needing to restart Inkscape.
When the registry is refreshed, all currently-loaded extensions should first be unloaded. When refreshed, no extensions (except for the standard defaults) should be loaded in memory.
Do we think this is that important? I don't think that it will be worth the pain to implement, it seems just as easy to me to restart Inkscape.
If I am understanding this correctly it would be particularly useful when you are developing and testing a new extension as it would allow you to refresh rather than restart the whole application each time you try out new modifications to you script. (The Gimp allows this for Scheme but not for Python (at least not that I've seen, I'm probably missing a trick) and in my early attempts to script the Gimp using Python it was frustrating trying to fix an incorrect script, needing to restart the program each time I made a minor change).
Extensions may wish to persist certain values or settings selected by the user or specified at installation time.
User settings can be handled via the Inkscape Preferences system. This is particularly appropriate for setting expected to change during use
This seems overly centralised like a registry to me and potentially brittle. perhaps each extension would keep its own preferences (lists of differnt kinds of preset values for an extension could be extensive) and the main preferences file would keep only a reference to it. by this extra seperation it could be easier to isolate problems and if an extion messed up its preferences some how it could be unloaded without messing up the main preferences file?
# include standard-disclaimer.h
all opinion, pinch of salt, etc.
Sincerely
Alan Horkana