On 28-Mar-06, at 11:04 AM, Marcus Denker wrote:
As for the vm-plugin: I think you just need to get the kedama plugin and put it into the path where the other plugins are and it should work.
That *should* be generally true. The plugin mechanism was designed to allow for internal and external plugins and all of them should work either way. For example, win32 VMs are typically delivered with all plugins made internal and this linked into the single .exe file. This is done because we know most win32 users are going to be terribly confused by a large number of files and wold probably delete most of them and then complain about stuff not working. Mac VMs come with most plugins made internal but some as external, which is probably historical - the osx bundle idea makes it easy to have a large collection of files hidden in what looks like a single file. The RISC OS vm application comes with all plugins external and uses the original application bundle idea to hide all the complexity. The unix vm... ech, I don't have the patience to care about unix anymore.
Note that an external plugin will override an internal one; so we can distribute bug fixes in plugins by sticking an external copy of (say) FilePlugin in the right place and next time FilePlugin is *loaded* the external one will be found and bound in. Note the *loaded* qualifier. If you are running an image that has done anything to use FilePlugin then the plugin is bound and you would have to explicitly unload it - SmalltalkImage current unloadModule: 'FilePlugin' - before it could be replaced with the new version. Plugins are *supposed* to be unloadable but I'd bet there is at least one that isn't, just on general principles.
To have it part of VMaker, Yoshiki would needs to coodinate that with Tim, if he's interested in having the plugin be part of the standard vm.
In general if a plugin is reasonably stable and reasonably broadly useful then it would be sensible to add it to the VMMaker package. A plugin still in early stages of development and undergoing rapid changes would not be a good candidate. A plugin for connecting to an obscure database only used by tapeworm biologists in Elbonia would probably not be.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Make sure your code "does nothing" gracefully.