Plug-in system

[fabiopelosin]

CocoaPods should have a plugin system which would allow to:

• Add additional sub commands.
  • The available gems should be inspected and the ones matching a given name should be required automatically in the Pod::Command.
  • A suitable name pattern could be cocoapods-#{NAME}-plugin.
  • I'm not sure about what would be the best way to introspect the available gems.
  • By simply requiring them the command will be registered by CLAide (already implemented).
  • The plug-ins should be loaded after the base commands are loaded so they can participate in the chain. Like having a subcommand like pod spec github-create URL.
• Hook in other places like the statistics generation process.
  • This is done to remove the big dependency on octokit and making the GitHub stats available only to those with the gem of the plug-in installed.

[fabiopelosin]

I'm closing this one for the time being, as there isn't a lot of demand for additional subcommands.

[alloy]

@irrationalfab Now that CocoaPods/CLAide#1 is in, someone could start on moving the statistics out, however as we no longer have the octokit dependency I wonder if that’s worth it?

[fabiopelosin]

Indeed the statistics could be moved out, however I would prefer to document how those plugins should integrate with the internals of CocoaPods. They are loaded early on so overriding methods should work (although we could provide some hook points).