I am building a GWT plugin for Chrome, and I think the manifest should
definitely include some indication of which platform a particular
binary is intended for. Trying to load them all and letting them fail
seems dangerous, as the differences between some platforms may not be
sufficient to prevent the library from loading (say two ELF-based x86
Unix distros).
I think Chrome should come up with a set of platform identifiers that
correspond to what are different builds, and the plugins should be
able to be associated with a particular platform. For backwards
compatibility, we could try and load any plugin without a platform tag
and hope it will fail to load if it isn't compatible, but that should
be deprecated. I think the proposal at the beginning of this thread
is fine, or you could simply add a new tag on the plugins entry, like
this:
...
"plugins": [
{ "path": "WINNT_x86-msvc/foo.dll", "public": true, "platform":
"WINNT_x86-msvc" },
{ "path": "Linux_x86_64-gcc3/libfoo.so", "public": true,
"platform": "Linux_x86-gcc3" },
{ "path": "Linux_x86_g4-gcc3/libfoo.so", "public": true,
"platform": "Linux_x86_64-gcc3" }
],
...
(path could still be anyway the developer wanted to organize the
libraries). Using a fixed naming convention would work, but it seems
awkward and doesn't save much over just specifying the platform
explicitly.
Also, we need a way to know at install time that the extension is not
supported on the current platform. Since conceivably the extension
might have an optional plugin and still operate without it on some
platforms, I think that means adding a new manifest entry like
supportedPlatforms: [ platforms ], and when you try and install the
CRX it will tell you the extension is not supported on your platform
if that tag is present but does not contain the current platform.
--
John A. Tamplin
Software Engineer (GWT), Google
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