MS RFC 8: Pluggable External Feature Layer Providers

Sean Gillies sgillies at FRII.COM
Thu Oct 27 09:34:51 EDT 2005


On Oct 27, 2005, at 7:03 AM, Daniel Morissette wrote:

> Sean Gillies wrote:
>
>>
>> I want to be able to use absolute paths instead of a combination of
>> relative path and environment variable or config property, and I   
>> think
>> others will also want this option.
>>
>>
>
> Can you please explain why that's needed? Is this simply because you
> don't want to be forced to place all your plugins in the same  
> directory
> or are there other reasons?

1. Right, I don't want to be restricted to a single plugin location.
2. We allow absolute paths to shapefiles, allowing the same for  
plugins eliminates yet another special case. Simplicity and  
uniformity are better.


>
> If we allowed the PLUGIN arg to contain path components relative to  
> the
> MS_PLUGIN_DIR var *if it is set*, just like the DATA statement works
> relative to the SHAPEPATH, but not the .so/.dll extension then would
> that do the trick for you?
>
> e.g.
>
> MAP
>    ...
>    CONFIG "MS_PLUGIN_DIR" "/opt/mapserver/plugins"
>    ...
>
>    LAYER
>      CONNECTIONTYPE CUSTOM
>      PLUGIN "/path/to/anotherdir/myplugin"
>      ...
>     END
>
>    LAYER
>      CONNECTIONTYPE CUSTOM
>      PLUGIN "myplugin"
>      ...
>     END
> END
>

Fine with me. I can see how a directory of plugins will be useful for  
products like ms4w, but it would actually impede me. If we can have  
each, that's great.

>
>
>
>> Jani,
>>
>>
>> What would you think about a change from CONNECTIONTYPE CUSTOM ->
>> CONNECTIONTYPE PLUGIN? I think that the meaning of "PLUGIN" will be
>> more clear to users.
>>
>>
>
> I like this idea.

:)

>
> Daniel
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>   Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
>   DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>

---
Sean Gillies
sgillies at frii.com
http://zcologia.com



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