Say you want to develop and distribute a plugin, and that this plugin relies on a third-party module or package. For the example, we'll say the third-party is matplotlib.
In order to distribute your plugin, you'd need give instructions so that your plugin's users install matplotlib either in their environment or in the site-package folder of their web2py installation. One way to avoid the hassle is to install matplotlib in the modules folder of your application. The custom_import function of gluon should do the rest of the work. Great. Now what if you develop a big application that relies on 4 plugins that each rely on 6 third-parties ? Should you install all 24 third-parties in your module folder ? Wouldn't it become quite a mess ? Here are suggestions to handling this issue : - Option 1: Modify the custom_import function so that it could add subdirectories of the modules folder that are plugin components (for instance all file paths that start with 'APP_NAME/modules/PLUGIN_NAME') Adding a plugin's module folder to the environment could be optional, just like running a plugin's models is optional and possible via the 'models_to_run' variable. - Option 2: Implementing pip inside web2py to manage plugin requirements upon install. This way, a plugin's installation would automatically trigger the installation of required third-parties into the site-package folder. In my opinion both solutions could be interesting and complementary. Feel free to contribute with your own opinion ! -- Resources: - http://web2py.com - http://web2py.com/book (Documentation) - http://github.com/web2py/web2py (Source code) - https://code.google.com/p/web2py/issues/list (Report Issues) --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "web2py-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to web2py+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
