[Qgis-developer] Installing providers into their own directory

[William Kyngesburye]

On Nov 22, 2011, at 1:43 PM, Martin Dobias wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Tim Sutton <lists at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>> Hi all
>> 
>> Does anyone have  problem withthis?:
>> 
>> https://github.com/qgis/Quantum-GIS/pull/63
>> 
>> This commit moves the providers into their own dir
>> (lib/qgis/providers) instead of mixing them with plugins. The reason
>> for this is to have a cleaner installation layout and to reduce noise
>> and possible issues when loading plugins to test if they are
>> providers.
> 
> Hi Tim
> 
> +1 from me. Recently I have been looking at the difference in speed if
> the plugins and providers were split. With clear file system cache the
> initialization of provider registry took ~1.8s with providers+plugins
> in one directory, only ~0.9s with just providers in the directory.
> 
> For 2.0 we could maybe load the providers (and plugins) only on demand
> to further save some time - only a directory list would be fetched on
> startup, the libraries would be loaded when a first layer would be
> loaded...
> 
Something else that fits in with this provider separation - providers are not shared libraries.  Any shared code should be put in a library.  This should be made clear in the developer docs and enforced.

The GRASS plugin in master is essentially broken on OS X because the provider is linked as a shared library, even with my partial fix:

http://hub.qgis.org/issues/3999

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

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