Re: Plugin mechanism(s) for Git?

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:18:28 +0000 (UTC)
Ben Peart [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Thanks for this great summary of the problem, Christian!

I think a generic plugin mechanism would be great but how would we
do it?

I’m also very glad to see the discussion about coming up with a good
pattern for how git can interact with external code.  I had also
noticed all the in-flight topics as I was searching for a good
pattern to adopt.

quoted

We could dynamically load libraries but this would force us to
freeze the ABI as mentioned by Duy:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/298463

I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss dynamically loaded libraries as
there are some distinct advantages over the other patterns especially
performance and simplicity.  I realize it requires us to version the
ABI but there are established patterns to manage this.  It also isn’t
that much different than us having to freeze or version the protocol
for communicating with a remote-helper.

Using dynamically loaded libraries precludes or greatly complicates
creation of plugins written in languages different from C (or C++ FWIW).

So that could be okay for some type of plugins (let's call them "core")
but not really for third-party / inhouse implementations.