Load plugin libraries on demand.

From: Martin Sevior (msevior@seviorpc.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 22:20:35 EDT

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    Hi Folks,
             AbiWord has now built up quite an array of plugins. However
    some of them, particularly ImageMagic, take fair while to load, which
    provides AbiWord with a significant increase in load time.

    It occured to me that we should really use the same mechanism we use to
    load plugins to load these extra libaries upon execution.

    So these additional libraries only get loaded once the plugin is
    actually activated.

    So my idea is that all plugins in the plugin directory get loaded at
    start up and put their UI into the menu system and their static methods
    into the ev_EditMethods structures as they do currently.

    However in the case of the plugins which link to large external
    libraries, these only get loaded once the functionality of the library
    is actually needed.

    Now I'm a bit of my depth here but I imagine we could reuse the current
    code load the plugins to do this secondary linking.

    I KNOW this is currently a problem. Debian, Bless their hearts, makes a
    full 1.99.2 version with all the plugins available on Debian SID. I used
    it the other day and was shocked to be presented with a 4-5 second load
    time on a fast machine.

    Cheers

    Martin

    (Who wants his cake and thinks he knows how to eat it too)

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