I'll second lex's motion on this.  It does, however, raise some new issues.  There will be an immediate proliferation of plugins, and with it the risk for naming conflicts.  Additionally, keeping track of all those files raises distribution issues.

Consider the following:

	(1) we should probably adopt some protocol for taking names out of the module namespace -- perhaps as simple as a swiki list of plugins in alphabetical order -- key system primitives, such as Tim's ought to have a particular naming convention so they can be manipulate and viewed on masse;
	(2) we should probably adopt some convention to use a blessed directory, say "Plugins" in the VM directory, for storing plugins (with the usual other places also in the search path); and;
	(3) we should probably think about formalizing the installation process to cater to these distributions.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: PC :lex at cc.gatech.edu > Sent: Friday, March 10, 2000 12:25 PM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: Pluginised VM seems to work quite well
> > > This is super work, Tim.  Besides the distribution angle, > this is simply
> a clean and logical way to arrange the system.
> > > Lex
> > > > tim at sumeru.stanford.edu wrote:
> > This email comes to you via Celeste running on a VM where > the sockets, serial, MIDI, sound, joystick & tablet etc stuff > is all out in plugins. Since the Acorn shares with unix the > tricky need to have socket polling callback, it is probably > the hardest port to get doing plugin-sockets. But it seems to > work ok so far.... :-) > Admittedly it only save 20% on the > VM executable size (but then the sound, serial, MIDI stuff > are empty stubs anyway on the Acorn) but it now means that if > I were to get the sound stuff working I wouldn't have to > issue an new VM, just the plugin.
> > > Right then, where's my linux machine, CodeWorrier for my > Mac and a volunteer to try it out on a PC?
> > > tim
> > > >