Plugin design advice needed

[wysota]

QtCreator has adopted the approach of putting all the required bits into the Core module, which is a mandatory plugin.

The Core plugin is different. It is being loaded by name before other plugins are loaded. It might have been a library instead.

That's another worry, but I think by careful segregation of functionality into a set of well-defined plugins, I can hopefully avoid this.

Sharing my experience (I wasn't responsible for this terrible architecture, nevertheless I couldn't find a way to untie this Gordian Knot without totally rewriting the system) I strongly advise you to decide apriori which functionality goes where and what depends on what and then stick to what you designed. Splitting or merging as you go will lead you exactly where we landed.

This is the hope, isn't it?

Well... it depends. My problem was that I was the only one fully understanding the plugin architecture so I was being asked a lot of questions how to do things with it.

[d_stranz]

I strongly advise you to decide apriori which functionality goes where and what depends on what

I typically do this; by the time I get to actually writing code it almost writes itself, it has been so thoroughly planned out. This helps me later, because I know exactly where everything is and which parts depend on something else when changes must be made. But it frustrates the people who keep asking, "When can you show me something?"

and then stick to what you designed.

And that's the hard part. Fortunately most of my efforts are one-person projects, so it is a bit easier to enforce my own design rules.