Propose alternative way to load plugins ( support local plugins )

[ThePlenkov]

Hi!

As we remember some time ago we had the cds.plugins property where we could mention list of plugins.

Later on an automatic plugin detection logic was introduced which scans package.json and finds all plugins with cds-plugin.js file in root.

I see here few problems:

• It's not possible to use locally defined plugins without adding them as dependencies to package.json. This goes against the concept of npm workspaces when modules are available without directly adding them to dependencies. In typescript we don't even need this - it's enough to resolve in tsconfig.json.
• If plugin by some reason brings problems - the only way to switch it off - is removing from package.json which is also not exactly what I want. I don't want to install/uninstall it - i want just to configure that certain plugin should not be in use.

Thefore I'd like to kindly ask to support cds.plugins option back ( via package.json or cdsrc.json ) which we can use like this ( in yaml just for better readability )

cds:
  plugins:
    # this is my local package and it's not available in package.json
   # instead i have there something like workspaces: [plugins/*] 
   # and @mylocal/some-plugin is stored in plugins/some-plugin
    - @mylocal/some-plugin
    # this plugin is resolved via package,json but i don't want it to be loaded
    - name: some-global-plugin
      disable: true

It may work in addition to plugins resolved with a current logic ( but respectig disable flag ).

What do you think about this?

Thanks!

[ThePlenkov]

Alternatively ( and this is already respecting the existing code ) we may support the option to provide a custom folder to load plugins from.

So if we can provide array of plugin roots
then we can just do something like

for ( const root of cds.env.plugin_roots ) {
  fetch_plugins_in (root, DEV)
}

But again - i don't think it's a good idea to mention path to a plugin somewhere. It should be enough to give a plugin name and then just import it dynamically like import('@namespace/plugin-name'). Module resolution should be delegated to the framework ( like Node, Typescript + package manager ).