feature request: able to select plugins at build-time

[abitmore]

This would be useful.

[nathanielhourt]

So would this look like we specify a set of plugins at build, and then those plugins get built-in and loaded automatically, regardless of what the config.ini says?

[oxarbitrage]

It is not the config the main problem, if the config loads a plugin that is not built then it will just throw or whatever.

The idea is for example if i want to use on my node only the account_history plugin i should not be compiling all the rest of them, i should have an option to only build that plugin.

It is not a big issue right now as plugins dont take a lot of time to build but i am thinking that as we encourage devs to write plugins the number of them in the future can and will be bigger.

Main problem i think is the amount of code that will need to be refactored as the headers of plugins are included everywhere.

[oxarbitrage]

As an example we can currently build the programs we want by make witness_node, that will build witness node and not the cli wallet nor other programs.
A similar option should be available for plugins.

I originally had the idea of plugin build options at cmake level, then check for them in the c++ to include plugin headers and to use plugin code; however this will make our code ugly with checks to include a header, a lot of conditionals, etc that i abandoned the idea.

[oxarbitrage]

This will also help us with the overall requirements of the bitshares-core. For example curl is used only in the 2 elasticsearch plugins but it needs to be installed even if the user is for example a block producer and only want to use the witness node plugin.

I have other plugin prototypes, for example a lua plugin where lua is required to be installed in the machine, zeromq, postgres, etc.
Currently, any plugin that uses a third party library will increase the requirements to build a node even if the user is not interested at all in the plugin features.

[pmconrad]

Related: PBSA/peerplays#31