hi.. currently libplasma uses the KDE plugin loading mechanisms *extensively*. they have also been marked as deprecated. the goal for frameworks, as i undestand it, is to move to a QPluginLoader.
QPluginLoader has a major limitation, however: it only returns a single instance of a class from the loaded library. one. ever. only. :) obviously, applications such as Plasma Desktop need to load the same plugin many times, as needed. the solution is obvious: create a factory class that returns new instances of the class(es) inside of the library. during our weekly plasma-workspaces meeting this topic came up and i suggested an approach (which I've also discussed with Thiago in passing) which i plan to implement at least for plasma- workspace as a short-term solution to get away from the KDE plugin loading. i will introduce a new macro (so that it remains source compatible, at least for libplasma) that creates a QObject subclass which itself provides a factory method to create new instances of the class(es) in the library. i would also like to fold in version compatibility checks. the resulting API of the generated object will look something like: template<class T> T *create(QObject *parent = 0) const; bool isVersionCompatible(quint32 minVersion, quint32 maxVersion); the version check method will help remove some boilerplate code from the library. create will be used similarly to how it KPluginLoader is now: create<Foo>() the QVariantList parameter will be removed as it seems to serve little real world purpose with how we design APIs now. thoughts, before i go write some code? -- Aaron J. Seigo
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ Kde-frameworks-devel mailing list Kde-frameworks-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-frameworks-devel
