I think in your particular case it's perfectly fine to require the developer to add a special line - after all, this is a piece of code that will (hopefully) become a part of the core. It's just a fact of the way the plugin system works at the moment that some aspects of of the framework cannot be loaded in the normal flow of things.
Just make sure the documentation is ultra clear... - james On 2/28/06, Derrick Spell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > With all the talk of 1.1, and with all the patches being applied, I > realized that my laziness (or lack of free time, depending on your > perspective) means that my OpenBase database adapter will most likely > not make it into 1.1. This is mainly because I never got around to > making it a plugin so that it could be throughly tested by the > OpenBase community before being committed. Well, I'm finally > motivated... > > In looking into what constitutes a plugin, I felt even more lazy and > stupid. All i needed to do was put my openbase_adapter.rb into a > vendor/plugins/openbase/lib folder. A single line init.rb file to > require the adapter and voila! Instant OpenBase! Ruby truly is a > beautiful language. The whole process brought a tear to my eye. > > But then...Disaster! Still no adapter! Not wanting to admit defeat, > nor to bother the core list with a trivial question during the big > 1.1 push, I delved further into the core than I had before. And > gentlemen, might I congratulate you on a rather beautiful code base. > Very clean. In just a few minutes I had tracked it down. The > initializer attempts to initialize_database before it attempts to > load_plugins. Of course, without a database adapter the initializer > ultimately raises an AdapterNotFound error and exits without ever > loading my lovely new plugin. > > I said to myself, "Self, you need to get your plugin loaded > earlier". And there it was...the environment. I added a single line > to environment.rb, just above the call to Rails::Initializer.run: > > Rails::Initializer.run(:load_plugins) > > Woohoo! OpenBase has been found! > > But now it seems that I've violated the very spirit of the plugin. A > plugin shouldn't require a developer to do anything more than drop > the plugin into the vendor/plugins directory, right? With my limited > exposure to the core, I knew no other answer. Realizing that I'm > going to fail my compilers course if I don't get back to doing my > homework, I decided I would ask the experts. > > Gentlemen (and ladies, perhaps?), what could I have done better? > > -Derrick Spell > _______________________________________________ > Rails-core mailing list > Rails-core@lists.rubyonrails.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-core > -- * J * ~ _______________________________________________ Rails-core mailing list Rails-core@lists.rubyonrails.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-core
