plugins as separate packages for desktop application

plugins as separate packages for desktop application

[Jack Hill]

Hi Guix,

I've been thinking about https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/34759 again 
recently. 34759 is an issue with GIMP in which it does not find plugins 
that are installed via separate packages in the same profile. I believe 
that what is going on is that GIMP is only looking for plugins in its 
store directory and in the user's XDG_CONFIG_DIR.

I've run into a similar issue (no ticket yet) with Blender. It seems like 
this might be a problem common to many applications, and I'm wondering if 
we should have a common solution. I don't really like the symlink 
workaround I used in the GIMP ticket because it won't work in the context 
of guix environment.

I think a good way forward would be to work with upstreams to have their 
applications support an APPNAME_PLUGIN_PATH variable and when plugins are 
present in a profile they would augment that variable.

What do y'all think? Is this a reasonable approach? Is there something I'm 
missing? A better way to proceed?

Thanks,
Jack

Re: plugins as separate packages for desktop application

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

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Jack,

Jack Hill 写道：
> I think a good way forward would be to work with upstreams to 
> have
> their applications support an APPNAME_PLUGIN_PATH variable and 
> when
> plugins are present in a profile they would augment that 
> variable.

I agree.  Many packages already do this & it jives nicely with our 
native-search-paths feature.

Two random lessons from previous experience with (well-meaning) 
upstreams:

1. Ensure that it's a search path (in the GNU sense of the word), 
a standard colon-separated one if at all possible, not just a 
single directory.
2a. Ensure that this environment variable can't be too easily 
(=accidentally) masked by a user preference, and
2b. don't use it as a 'default value' to initialise a preference 
that will later be saved to disc, because that's how we end up 
with weird bugs.

Thanks for taking charge of this,

T G-R

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