Now that GNOME 44 is out the door, I took some time to do a bunch of the refactoring I’ve wanted in libpeas for quite some time. For those not in the know, libpeas is the plugin engine behind applications like Gedit and Builder.
This does include an ABI break but libpeas-1.0 and libpeas-2 can be installed side-by-side.
In particular, I wanted to remove a bunch of deprecated API that is well over a decade old. It wasn’t used for very long and causes libpeas to unnecessarily link against gobject-introspection-1.0.
Additionally, there is no need for the libpeas-gtk library anymore. With GTK 4 came much more powerful list widgets. Combine that with radically different plugin UI designs, the “one stop plugin configuration widget” in libpeas-gtk just isn’t cutting it.
Now that there is just the single library, using subdirectories in includes does not make sense. Just #include <libpeas.h> now.
Therefore, PeasEngine is now a GListModel containing PeasPluginInfo.
I also made PeasExtensionSet a GListModel which can be convenient when you want to filter which extensions use care about using something like GtkFilterListModel.
And that is one of the significant reasons for the ABI break. Previously, PeasPluginInfo was a boxed-type, incompatible with GListModel. It is now derived from GObject and thusly provides properties for all the important bits, including PeasPluginInfo:loaded to denote if the plugin is loaded.
A vestige of the old-days is PeasExtension which was really just an alias to GObject. This just isn’t needed anymore and we use GObject directly in function prototypes.
PeasActivatable is also removed because creating interfaces is so easy these days with language bindings and/or G_DECLARE_INTERFACE() that it doesn’t make sense to have such an interface in-tree. Just create the interface you want rather than shoehorning this one in.
I’ve taken this opportunity to rename our development branch to main and you can get the old libpeas-1.0 ABI from the very fresh 1.36 branch.