🎉 Plugins!

[andyholmes]

🎉 Plugins!

Development on Valent continues, although a lot of the work recently has been behind the scenes, as the project moves towards a stable API. But I wonder if I've mentioned, Valent is written to be extremely modular; almost everything is a plugin.

For you early adopters, and I have no idea how many of you there are, I've put up a plugin template if you're itching for a feature or have something custom in mind. The repository is up now and supports GitHub's template function.

The template has a barebones example of a device plugin (these are the plugins you're familiar with), although there are many other types of extensions you can write. See the API documentation for implementation details and the mock plugins used in the test suite for examples. There is no tutorial yet, unfortunately.

The repository includes a CI workflow that builds a Flatpak bundle for pull requests, and a CD workflow that can deploy x84_64 and aarch64 builds to a repository hosted for free by GitHub Pages (see the flatter GitHub Action for details). This allows you to create a plugin with a custom protocol, then add the Flatpak repository to your Linux desktop and your Linux smartphone (e.g. PinePhone). You can also re-implement an standard device plugin, of course.

Although the plugin API is unstable, the breakages shouldn't be terrible or constant, and will generally make writing plugins easier. If you plan on writing plugins in the future, this is a good time to start giving feedback on the plugin API.

[andyholmes]

I've just queued up #407, which adds Vala API bindings for Valent 🙂

Although the built-in plugins will always be C, hopefully this will make it easier for other platforms to integrate with Valent.

[andyholmes]

Closing, since there doesn't seem to be a general interest in third-party plugins. The API will likely still go through some changes, until the project is out of alpha.