Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 12/11/2009 10:58 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
The concerns have been 1) they will be abused with the introduction
of proprietary plugins
How so?
A typical scenario is someone develops a closed source plugin, but does
not distribute it with the original piece of software thinking that they
aren't creating a derived work because there's no combination.
But it's not necessary to get too tied up in this one. The later are
more important.
2) we would have tremendous difficulty maintaining a stable plugin abi
Then don't promise it. GCC doesn't for example. (And it solves
problem 1 too!...)
GCC is not the best example since it's support for plugins are
relatively new. It's bad for users. They start using a plugin for one
version and they really like it, they want to update to a new version of
the base program and now their plugin no longer works. The plugin has
gone unmaintained and now they have to choose between the plugin and
updating the base program.
3) they would create stability issues
in qemu because the plugin quality cannot be controlled.
How is this different from 3rd party modules in the kernel?
I don't think the kernel is an example of it working smoothly. It's a
constant source of frustration for users and people are constantly doing
ugly things wrt licensing.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
