MapServer plugins howto help?

[William Kyngesburye]

I thought I could wait until the plugin architecture for MS 4.8 was  
documented, but I ran into a snag and it looks like I need to figure  
this out.

Summary: I weak-link (a Darwin/Mac OS X thing) the OCI libraries so I  
can build with Oracle support, but not include the libraries in the  
package and users don't have to download and install the OCI  
libraries if they don't need it, and MS will still run if Oracle is  
never used.  The library loader only tries to load weak-links when  
needed.

Problem: Python ignores this somehow, and tries to load all symbols  
anyways when mapscript is imported.


So, I want to build the Oracle support to MapServer as a plugin.  I'm  
not creating a new data source, just changing one to a plugin.  The  
RFC wasn't any help for the build process, but there was something  
about adding a call to a plugin function (depending on how  
complicated/messy that can get patching the code, I might be able to  
handle that).

Going by the GRASS-GDAL plugin as an example, for the build process,  
I could probably figure out the build side of things.  Something  
like: make the object file, include headers from mapserver similar to  
what's used in the MS makefile for the format; link the object file  
into a library, with the libmap.a and necessary libs for the format.   
Or would libmap be needed, since that'll be available in the MS  
binary at runtime (I would have to link with some 'undefined' options  
to deal with that)?


-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos at kyngchaos.com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"History is an illusion caused by the passage of time, and time is an  
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