Loading plugins by default

[Etan Reisner]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 01:08:52AM -0400, Shreevatsa R wrote:
> What would be a good way to distribute Pidgin such that some plugins
> are loaded by default?
>
> More context:
> Albert Zeyer has made some modifications (#2629, #8448) so that Pidgin
> can be distributed as a a single .app bundle:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-macosx/
> He chose to enable some plugins he viewed as useful, in such a way
> that they get loaded by default each time Pidgin is started. This
> means that the user's preferences (of which plugins to load) are
> ignored, so I'm wondering if there is a better way to do this.
>
> I can think of a few things; which of the following would work?
<snip>
> 3. A special plugin that loads the default set of plugins, and which
> can be turned off. Is such a plugin possible?

Such a plugin is in fact entirely possible, and in combination with the
'hack' we have suggested to people before could be handled without
loading/unloading this plugin and without the user even noticing it.

> 4. Some better mechanism, which I haven't thought of or am not aware of.

Plugins get probed and have their init functions called regardless of if
they are actually loaded, most plugins do nothing or essentially nothing
in the init function, but nothing stops a plugin from actually doing
things there. So the default-plugin-loading plugin could set a pidgin
preference to indicate to itself that it has already run and then set
manually load the desired plugins. For example.

We tend to suggest that plugins don't do this as it is borderline evil,
but this sort of usage would be about as 'good' as you can get it,
especially in the context of shipping an app bundle.

> Thanks for any suggestions,
> -Shreevatsa

    -Etan