On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 03:13:49PM -0800, John Myers wrote: > I'm currently -0.9 on the plethora of plugins in the tvd-evaltoplugin > branch. This change appears to be adding quite a bit of complexity for > little to no practical benefit. It appears to be trying to separate > code out into individual plugins just for the sake of separating code > out into individual plugins.
This came out of discussions at ApacheCon where we decided to get rid of
EvalTests, which means the code had to become plugins. The layout of things
in tvd-evaltoplugin is not final, it's just a working version that doesn't
have EvalTests.
> Why so many plugins? The combinatorics lead to a huge number of
> possible configurations, most of which simply don't make sense. Why
> would someone load the HeaderEval plugin but not the BodyEval plugin?
You either have 1 big plugin, which may as well be EvalTests, or you have
many plugins, one for each function. The current split is somewhere in the
middle where I tried grouping semi-related functions together by rule type.
> A key facet of plugins is that they are optional. For something to be
> correctly designed as a plugin, it must make sense for the plugin to be
> loaded and it must make sense for the plugin to not be loaded.
Not really. A key facet of plugins is that someone may turn off or
replace the functionality to avoid or change behavior, overhead, etec.
There's no requirement that the functionality be optional. Heck, there's
talk about making PerMsgStatus::check() a plugin -- that definitely
isn't optional functionality.
> What does it mean to load the Bayes plugin, but have
> either use_bayes or use_bayes_rules turned off? What does it mean to
> have use_bayes_rules enabled but the Bayes plugin not loaded?
Sure. There was talk about completely plugin-izing Bayes, this could
be considered a first step.
> the EvalTests to match those of plugins. It does not, however, make
> sense to have the loading of those eval tests be optional.
Actually, that doesn't make sense. ;) There's nothing special about
these eval rules that makes them necessary to the functionality of the
software. In fact, there was talk that some/a bunch would go away due
to results anyway.
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