[Qgis-developer] Decorations

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Tim

2011/8/22 Tim Sutton <lists at linfiniti.com>:
> Hi
>
> Thanks Martin! Yeah turning them into map canvas items would be nice.
> Did we already break API compatibility? It would be nice to tag git at
> the point before it is/was broken.

No, these changes have not break anything. The only possible problem
might I see is that users which compile qgis from source will have to
disable (or better remove) the affected plugin modules, otherwise they
may get the decorations twice (both from plugin and from app).


> By the way I don't know when you last disabled python, but QGIS starts
> up really quickly without it - I think scanning python plugins adds a
> lot more overhead than scanning C++ ones...or maybe its loading up the
> python bindings in general that kill start up time.

I know, there is quite a difference.

One thing that makes the loading slow is that the plugin installer
walks through all the plugins (even those which are disabled) and
calls their classFactory() method to find out whether a plugin is
broken (due some import / syntax errors).
@Borys: is it possible to get rid of this check during startup?

To optimize the loading speed I would like to move plugins' metadata
from __init__.py to a text file (e.g. metadata.txt) - this would mean
that the plugin code would not have to be loaded at all if disabled.
Moreover reading of metadata would be simpler for plugin repository.

Finally, there may be also some plugins that do too much
(unnecessary?) initialization during startup which could be postponed.

bye
Martin