Plugin API

Modest plugin system

API and ABI

API

The API is available at the include directory for modest plugin. If the prefix for modest is /usr it will be at /usr/include/modest-plugin-1.0/. The most interesting thing there is the ModestProtocol framework. To support a new protocol (transport or store), you have to register a new instance of ModestAccountProtocol in the ModestProtocolRegistry. There you'll find methods to implement specific UI for setting them up.

ABI

As it's a new born plugin system, for now, we cannot provide an ABI contract. It will be changing as new features are requested for the plugin system. Once it's been around for a while, we'll estabilise the public API and provide the expected ABI contract.

Meanwhile, plugins should be kept in sync with modest.

How to build a new module

Linking

A module should be built using the paths obtained from pkg-config. The name of the pkg-config module is modest-plugin-1.0. As usual, you can check and fetch the specific deployment information in configure.ac:

    PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MODESTPLUGIN,modest-plugin-1.0)

Module format

The plugin should be a libnameofplugin.so file. You should provide also an information file with extension .modest-mail-plugin and this format:

    [Modest Mail Plugin]
    Module=nameofplugin
    IAge=2
    Name=Plugin name
    Description=Description of the plugin
    Authors=John Doe <jdoe@address.com>
    Copyright=Copyright <C2><A9>2008 John Doe
    Website=http://modest.garage.maemo.org

In fact only the Module field is used currently. Modest will go through all the .modest-mail-plugin files and load their modules. Fetching mail plugins module directory

Main plugins will be fetched in /usr/lib/modest/mail-plugins with the default setup. Anyway, you can fetch your specific modest plugin installation path using pkg-config:

    pkg-config --variable=plugindir modest-plugin-1.0

In configure.ac you can do this to export the plugindir to the Makefile files:

    MODESTPLUGIN_PLUGINDIR=`pkg-config modest-plugin-1.0 --variable=plugindir`
    AC_SUBST(MODESTPLUGIN_PLUGINDIR)

Implementation notes

Implementation notes for plugin system