[c-lightning] Plug-in dependency management

[Corné Plooy]

Hi,


A recent PR[1] made me wonder: is lightningd asymptotically evolving
towards an architecture where all functionality is in a set of mutually
dependent plug-ins, with lightningd as a sort of an RPC microkernel? I'm
not really against this (it provides nice features like this PR), but
will this be a workable end result?


In the end, we're probably going to need some kind of dependency
checking between plug-ins. I guess that, with Rusty in the team, we
could take Linux kernel modules as an example - if I'm not mistaken,
Linux does some dependency checking when I do insmod, and it even
resolves them with modprobe. I think it's all about providing and
requiring *interfaces* - multiple implementations could provide the same
interface.


Maybe we're not at the point yet where the problem for this solution
really exists, but it is something to keep in mind for the future.


CJP


[1] https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/pull/3260