>  Plugins are probably necessary as
> seperate .so files at an ad hoc development level, but I'd argue that
> there ought to be a way to make the building of them easier (perhaps a
> Squeak equivalent of gimptool?) and to make them loadable from within
> Squeak (which, I think, is what the VMMaker folk are talking about in
> the plugin suffixes thread).
I'm not quite sure what your point is here, but I'll try to offer
something useful anyway -

Plugins aren't useful only during development time, they are a way to
break the VM into pieces so that you can have some way to configure
things. Instead of having a monolithic VM where you have to make empty
stubs for capabilities you can't support just to satisfy the linker, you
can simply ignore the unused plugins - don't build them at all. This
also has the virtue of making it easier to keep separated those things
that should be separated, and encourages people to write the image code
so it can cope without having a plugin. The only arguments I can
remember being offered for why you would want to build a VM with all
the plugin code generated for internal linking is one relating to
supposed convenience of installation. I'm on record as having little
patience with that assertion :-) after all hardly any applications for
any platform consist of only one file.

As for making the  building of plugins easier, the VMMaker is definitely
all about that. The hardest part to automate adequately is
creating the makefile -some platforms can do it easily, others look like
being more problematic and so there is still some manual work to do to
adda new plugin to your lists.

Finally, if the plugins weren't loadable from within Squeak, how would
they ever work? Your fingers must surely have escaped from your control
for a moment and typed something other thn you meant.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: Recursive: (see Recursive)