On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:

On 27.08.2009, at 10:36, Andrew Gaylard wrote:

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:16 AM, Ian Piumarta<piumarta@speakeasy.net> wrote:

Does anyone use the plugin mechanism to load libraries that are not plugins
on Unix?  Or to override just one or two of the installed ones from a user
directory?

I'm thinking of simplifying the search strategy (which is indeed broken
w.r.t. overriding installed plugins as Subbu points out) along with all the
junk related to probing for a zillion prefixes and suffixes.  Unlike
libtool, CMake manages to build loadable modules with predictable 'lib*.so'
names regardless of the platform.  That, combined with a launch script that
can add a -plugins option to the VM args, suggests it ought to be possible
to find the plugin precisely on the first attempt, without having to search
at all.

The advantage is vastly simpler logic that is completely predictable.

Agreed.

The disadvantage is that it will not be possible to subvert the plugin
mechanism to load system libraries, and it will not be possible to override
the installed plugins with a single plugin built in a different directory.
 Would either of these be a noticeable loss?

Nope.  Go for it!

- Andrew

+1

As for debugging, what I usually do is symlink the plugin from my build dir to the default plugin dir.

Out of curiosity, which other extensions than .so are in use currently?

- Bert -