On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 02:57:54PM -0700, Tim Rowledge wrote:
>
> One item I haven't finished is a way to auto detect all the plugins that
> should be built. The ugly hack way that springs to mind like 'Frog
> Surprise' is to just stick a method #shouldBeBuilt in each plugin class,
> but somehow that seems just too ugly. Should I just give in to
> expedience? Surely not...

How about letting plugin classes register themselves with class VMMaker.
Then "VMMaker initialise" would set up its plugin registry to some
default for building a base Squeak system. Interested classes could
do "VMMaker addPlugin: self" to add themselves to the registry.
Then someone writing UnixOSProcessPlugin could add a #startUp method
that would do something like this:

startUp
  |vmMaker|
  Smalltalk platformName = 'unix'
    ifTrue:
      [vmMaker := Smalltalk at: #VMMaker ifAbsent: [].
      vmMaker ifNotNil: [vmMaker addPlugin: self]]

Instances of VMMaker would of course still be able to add and remove
plugin classes to taste, but the class side registry could set things
up with reasonable defaults.

Dave