Re: Subclass? Plugin? Mixin? Monkey Patch?

# from David E. Wheeler
# on Wednesday 18 June 2008 07:54:

>On Jun 18, 2008, at 01:57, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
>>> so I guess that subclassing isn't
>>> necessarily the best way to go.
>>
>> Do you have enough tuits to dust-off the "plugin architecture"
>> thread?
>
>Link?

  http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module.build/2008/03/msg1298.html

There are more if you point your favorite search engine at 
nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module.build and ask about plugins.

>How hard can it be? (He asks, ignoring the dragons.)

The dragons I've seen are the difficulty of testing and lack of 
coverage - particularly with regard to multiple environments and 
configurations.

>> And then there's the thing where some features are optional and the
>> dependencies aren't necessary for the install (e.g. developer
>> targets.)
>
>Huh? Plugins can be distributed separately, with their own
>dependencies, I'm sure.

If a plugin is not needed for the 'build', 'test', or 'install' targets 
on a target (user) machine, there should be a way to make it optional.  
We also have to make sure that whatever gets printed to the 
compatibility Makefile.PL accounts for that or uses a plain M::B - or 
just refuse to write a Makefile.PL if it's not easily solvable.

--Eric
-- 
perl -e 'srand; print join(" ",sort({rand() < 0.5}
  qw(sometimes it is important to be consistent)));'
---------------------------------------------------
    http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------