[Webmacro-devel] Re: ContextTool: A different approach

[Brian G. <br...@qu...>]

> Only when you discount the fact that tools and probably functions, 
> along with #macros, #beans, and <future thing here> could all be 
> configured through this template.
> 
> You seem focused on context tools alone, but I'm suggesting something 
> that will give us greater flexibility with lots of other things... in a 
> consistent manner.

I think that in reality, getting this will be harder than it looks.
There was a lot of special macro-aware crap that had to go into
#include as macro; my guess is that we will have to add additional
tool-aware, bean-aware, and <future> aware code to #include as this
plan moves forward.  That means that the goal of stripping down WM to
a micro-kernel and moving all the other stuff to loadable modules is
harder than it looks.

But the bigger goal is a good one, and I'd like to explore it further,
but I don't think any of the current proposals really move us very far
in that direction.  How about turning ALL directives, tools,
functions, and macros into some sort of WM plugins?  We're close to
that in the core -- the config part is really the only part left.

> And really, what I have in my head isn't for header/footer text, but 
> for "context stuffing".  I can almost see header/footer templates being 
> useful configuration options, but that's not what I'm suggesting.

Right, and the footer would do "context unstuffing" and unregister
anything that the header registered (or clean up anything the header
added.)  This gives us the cleanup mechanism some people wanted.  

> template build-time (one-time only) creation of most tools
> addition of a "global.wm" template
> consistent configuration of tools, macros, functions

I think we have the first, the second is easy to add but has nothing
to do with the current discussion (but I'd +1 it), and the third we
have.