[compiz] Plugin Library Interface

[Danny Baumann]

Hi,

> Except from the notifications on Load/Unload it does
> not offer anything but another framework to load dlls
> at runtime. I fail to see any real benefit

Maybe I should outline the benefits a bit more:
- as you said, load/unload notifications
- library plugins can wrap into core functions, dlopen'ed ones can't
- library plugins can have options, dlopen'ed ones can't

All in all library plugins are more plugin than a plain library, plugins
which just happen to provide arbitrary functions to other plugins. Maybe
the text plugin isn't the best example, but imagine a "movement
animation" plugin where other plugins can request movement animation
calculations from. This plugin would wrap into preparePaintScreen, do
all the needed calculations and deliver the results to the requesting
plugins. With such a plugin, all the animation settings (e.g. speed /
timestep) or types (spring model like as it is now / new linear
animation) could be set inside this plugin. Of course the API design of
such a plugin would need a lot of thinking about first, but the first
step is to create a framework to make it possible in theory.

Regards,

Danny