Nearing a new release

June 28, 2005 [FreeGuide, Tech]

FreeGuide is hopefully nearing a new release. Alex has been working on the plugins system, and hopefully I will be able to test it this week. If it works ok, we'll release it as unstable, and then with a few bug fixes we should be able to make the next release stable. Alex has refactored the code so that the main program is just another plugin. This is pretty cool as it means we can upgrade everything without restarting the program (hopefully, although in practice we think we may hit problems with resources not being freed). We are currently discussing exactly who should be able to upgrade what plugin when. I am keen that users be able to get a new listings grabber as soon as they need one without needing their admin to do it for them. On the other hand, probably only the admin should be able to upgrade the main app. The way jEdit does these things seems to work pretty well.