The 0.5 release of Mono.Addins comes packed with new features, including:
* User defined custom attributes can now be used to declare extensions
and add-in metadata.
* The new AddinEngine class allows hosting several independent add-in
engines in a single application domain.
* Improved lazy loading of add-ins. More information is now lazy loaded.
* An XML manifest can now be split in several files embedded as resources
in an assembly.
* More add-in information can be declared using custom attributes instead
of an XML manifest: author list, imported files and assemblies, optional
modules, localizers.
* Added new API based on generic methods and collections.
* New MSBuild tasks file and target, which allows using add-in references
directly in a build file (still experimental).
* Reorganized the samples directory.
* Many bug fixes.
This changes the buildlink3.mk files to use an include guard for the
recursive include. The use of BUILDLINK_DEPTH, BUILDLINK_DEPENDS,
BUILDLINK_PACKAGES and BUILDLINK_ORDER is handled by a single new
variable BUILDLINK_TREE. Each buildlink3.mk file adds a pair of
enter/exit marker, which can be used to reconstruct the tree and
to determine first level includes. Avoiding := for large variables
(BUILDLINK_ORDER) speeds up parse time as += has linear complexity.
The include guard reduces system time by avoiding reading files over and
over again. For complex packages this reduces both %user and %sys time to
half of the former time.
The 0.4 release includes several improvements and bug fixes:
* Added support for specifying paths to exclude from the add-in
scan in .addins files [1] and in add-in manifests [2].
* There are several new flags [3] which can be applied to
add-ins:
* Can't uninstall: the add-in can't be uninstalled.
* Can't disable: the add-in can't be disabled.
* Hidden: the add-in won't be visible in the setup tools.
* Fixes in the add-in scanner.
* The new (and optional) Mono.Addins.CecilReflector
assembly provides a Cecil-based backend for the add-in
scanner. This scanner is more reliable than the
reflection based scanner.
* When updating the registry, the add-in scanner will only
update add-ins belonging to the running application
(ignoring directories from other instances of the same
or different applications sharing the same registry).
* Fixed issue with path length limitation in Windows.
* Other bug fixes and API improvements.
