Richard Guenther wrote:
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Basile
STARYNKEVITCH<bas...@starynkevitch.net> wrote:
I would prefer some discussion to happen, instead of blindly proposing
patches on gcc-patches@ and have them rejected until I find a consensus.
Do you think that
1. We should not care about where system wide plugins are located, and leave
the -fplugin command as it is.
In practice that would mean every plugin use to be wrapped, e.g. by a
CFLAGS=-fplugin=$(shell pkg-config -gccplugins gtkgcc) -O
in a Makefile
2. We should have a path of GCC plugins, i.e. a sequence of directories
where plugins are searched.
a. should this path be setable only by a -fplugin-path option
b. should this path be also settable thru e.g. an environment variable like
GCC_PLUGINS_PATH
c. what is the default value of this path
Notice that dlopen already uses LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but I feel it is not
entirely appropriate for our purposes (because plugins are not libraries,
even if they share the .so ...).
I think we should reach a consensus quickly: the stage 1 is closing soon, and
such a patch has to happen very soon!
On the contrary. If we put in place such a mechanism we have
to maintain it forever. It is hard to tell what is the correct solution
without distributors facing the problem (there are no existing
plugins that can be packaged or are packaged now).
I am not sure to agree on that argument. My observation is that most of
the (free, Linux) programs permitting plugins do define some
conventions., which are coded inside the application. (Of course the
convention should be configurable). In some of the applications, the
convention is provided by wrapping the executable in a shell script
(ooffice, firefox). In other applications, the convention is wired in
the binary (so is provided by the source file): java, GTK,QT, ...
It should be noted that we have just to define a convention (and of
course implement it, but the implementation is trivial). And I don't
understand why is maintaining such a convention such a big burden.
If we don't define or propose anything, I would be afraid that either
plugins could be less used, or that various distributions would have
various widely incompatible conventions.
Regards.
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
