I suggested moving the settings to a plugin a while ago on IRC, the major
objections were:
a) Voice isn't (yet) supported
b) Requires a disk spinup (to load the plugin) each time you want to
change a setting.
Tom's work should resolve (a).
For (b), I proposed that we allow the last-loaded plugin to remain
resident (i.e. cached) so that unless you used another plugin, the
settings menu would remain in the plugin buffer. We could even load it as
the default plugin while the disk is still spinning at startup maybe -
thus you'd never see an extra spinup until you ran another plugin.
To do this would need a change to all existing plugins which have
statically initialised variables; they would need to explicitly reset
values on entry (or in some cases maybe choose to make better use of the
cached model).
Any takers?
I like this idea. I suspect I wouldn't use many plugins, even when they are
supported with speech. As from what I can tell, a lot of them are graphical
in nature, either games or weird demo things.
The only ones I can see myself using off the top of my head are a few games,
and maybe the properties one once in a while.
However I do like the idea of settings being loaded by default even if it
meant a bit of work to implement.
I can see one problem with that though, and that is what happens for example
if you want to have something like battery bench running? I no people won't
use that plugin very offten, but if i remember right, that doesn't allow you
to have any other plugins running while your using it, so unless there is a
work around for it, it seems to me that you wouldn't be able to change
settings while battery bench was being run, which i think would be a bit of
a drawback unless there is a solution.
