[PD-dev] Gui plugins management (Was: I have 3 broken installs)

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On 03/28/2013 09:28 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> 
>> From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
>> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: "pd-dev at iem.at" <pd-dev at iem.at>
>> Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 4:50 PM
>> Subject: Re: [PD-dev] Gui plugins management (Was: I have 3 broken installs)
>>
>> On 03/28/2013 01:46 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  ----- Original Message -----
>>>>  From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
>>>>  To: pd-dev at iem.at
>>>>  Cc: 
>>>>  Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 4:26 PM
>>>>  Subject: Re: [PD-dev] Gui plugins management (Was: I have 3 broken 
>> installs)
>>>>
>>>
>>>  [...]
>>>
>>>>  How about we start with adding only the required mechanism so that 
>> people
>>>>  can make all sorts of plugin management plugins.  Then revisit the rest
>>>>  later once we have a good idea of how it should be done.  Making the 
>> plugin
>>>>  loader ignore a folder called DISABLED/ would make it possible to do 
>> what
>>>>  you describe in a regular plugin.
>>>>
>>>>  .hc
>>>
>>>  Do you want to require plugins to live in one specific "startup" 
>> directory that
>>>  has user permissions to read/write/exec?  If so, then I think the 
>> "startup/disabled"
>>>  directory idea is adequate.
>>>
>>>  On the other hand, if you want Pd to search the standard paths for plugins
>>>  then the "startup/disabled" idea is incompatible with that, no?  
>> Permission problems
>>>  abide, plus when you want to re-enable a plugin how does Pd know which 
>> directory
>>>  it previously lived in?
>>
>> As I see it now, DISABLED/ would be ignored in all search paths.  And when a
>> plugin is disabled, it would be moved into the local DISABLED/ folder.
> 
> That method will fail when the user running Pd doesn't have permission to move
> those files.
> 
> -Jonathan

That is true.  That would only really affect multi-user setups where a
sysadmin was installing plugins.  Maybe Andras' idea for using a list that is
stored in the GUI preferences makes the most sense here.  If the plugin list
is present, then it loads that, if not, it uses the search path method.

Or there is IOhannes' method with the autostart plugin.  It has the advantage
of being controlable via the file system, i.e. if the autostart plugin is
removed, then its disabled.  This list method would need to be disabled via
the preferences.

One way to handle that would be that the plugin-plugin would have to handle
the writing of the list to the preferences each time Pd runs, and Pd would
load the list if it was present, then delete it from the preferences.  Hmm,
that might be hacky...

.hc