Sunday, January 27, 2008

Making sure extra tasks get run when installing plugins with Piston

When I graduated college, I was a EE major that could code. However, in hindsight, I don't think I was as good because I had no idea how to put together moderate sized systems or above. One of the things that I like about Rails is that they have a system for plugins. I was too uncouth to consider it before. Once you extract a plugin out, you essentially have to treat it as a separate library or package. This forces you to encapsulate, because it's a bit of a pain changing plugins. I know you can extract code out to DLLs or Gems, but I never did it because it seemed like I didn't need it--plus it was extra steps.

I eventually would want a programming language that lets me extract out libraries inside the language, and make its public interface RESTful, and auto-extern its path in SVN and whatever the equivalent is in distributed version control like git/darcs.

Recently, I've started using Piston. It's a ruby plugin manager that's essentially a wrapper around svn:externals. It's been pretty easy to use. In addition, my plugins won't get stale. However, when you install a plugin with piston, you only import the files. It doesn't actually execute the install.rb file, like /script/plugin install would. I'll try to see if I can submit a patch to piston later, but for now, simply run "install.rb" in the root of the plugin, and it should do the install for you. small tip!

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:36 AM

    Hello Wilhelm!

    No, Piston will never run install.rb. Piston is a general tool, and as such, it cannot know if you're importing a Rails plugin or a PHP library into your project. How would Piston know to run a specific file in an opaque library ?

    And I would like to correct your assumption: Piston isn't a wrapper for svn:externals. It's a replacement.

    Thanks for using Piston and mentioning it on your blog.

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  2. I was under the impression that it was for rails plugin management, so that's where my assumptions came from.

    I suppose piston can look at the dir and file structure to tell whether it's a plugin or other standardized code. But it would have the added overhead of doing the comparisons.

    Well, other than that, it's been a cinch to use. So if you had a hand in it, thanks.

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