GSoC Weekly Check-In (Week 4-5)

What Did I do last week?

We continued with the discussions on the runtime-plugins. After finalizing the plugin system, we discussed how to facilitate it with the existing Reva codebase. (See #1814)

One of the main concerns of the maintainers was to maintain the backwards compatibility. We still wanted to support the existing in-memory registry way of loading plugins. To ensure this, we decided to provide the user an option to switch between plugin mode and registry mode. The registry mode would work same as before and would load plugins from the in-memory registry, whereas the plugin mode would use hashicorp go-plugin mechanism to load the provided plugin.

In the plugin mode, the users are given 3 ways to load the plugins, as describe below:

1. Users can directly provide the path to the plugin binary and the reva code base should directly load the binary (via hashicorp go-plugin).

2. Users can provide the path to the locally existing reva drivers. The reva core should first compile the provided source into an executable and then load it.

3. Users can also provide an URL, pointing to some version control system like github and reva core should download the repo locally, compile the source code and then load the binary executable.

# Method 1:
[grpc.service.userprovider]
driver="/path/to/binary"

# Method 2:
[grpc.service.userprovider]
driver="/path/to/source_code"

# Method 3:
[grpc.service.userprovider]
driver="github.com/reva-pkg/userprovider"

I started with the initial implementation in the last of couple weeks. My task was to complement the existing json driver (userprovider service) to runtime paradigm. I was able to accomplish that and with the current implementation, the reva core is able to load a compiled binary plugin.

Link to PR: https://github.com/cs3org/reva/pull/1861

What will I do next week?

The plan for next couple of weeks is to work on the compilation stage. For the compilation stage, the reva core should ideally compile the provided plugin and then load it.

Any hiccups?

Not really. Just a few bugs here and there, but nothing major!