On 06-09-2015, at 9:20 AM, Chris Cunnington <brasspen at gmail.com> wrote:
> A plugin repository would not account for internal plugins, but I still think it's a good idea. It could focus and foster external plugin hacking.

Well, yes and no - don’t forget that all plugins are supposed to be compilable for either case and that the vm is supposed to check for an external plugin before looking at the internal ones. That latter part was intended to allow for over-riding buggy internal plugins in our original ‘spec’, such as it was. Part of any plugin repository should be the inclusion of all plugins; then we can easily grab one to test if an internal plugin is suspected buggy. 

We shouldn’t forget that plugins are unloadable too. Or at least, they’re supposed to be! This is intended to  help in development and testing of the plugins; you can write, build, try (which loads) and unload, rinse & repeat. Even internal plugins can be unloaded and in fact you ought to be able to have a running system, grab a new/fixed/experimental external version of XYPlugin, unload the already in use internal XYPlugin and make a call to an XYPlugin routine.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Talks to plants on their own level.