Metadata and configuration

• Metadata that Avogadro needs to know in order to properly run a plugin was until now obtained dynamically by running the plugin

• Instead, metadata is now extracted from static TOML files

  • plugin.json is deprecated

• The static metadata for a plugin contains the following information:

  • The type of plugin

  • The features provided by the plugin, the types of each plugin feature (file-formats, menu-commands etc.), and various information about each feature e.g. what the display names and/or menu paths for each of those items should be

  • Info about the plugin’s provenance that was previously in plugin.json e.g. author, version number

  • Whether or not the plugin wants a configuration to be recorded for it in the main Avogadro configuration file, and if so, what entries the config should have for the plugin

• The metadata file may be in the form of:

  • pyproject.toml – the normal project metadata file in use in the modern Python ecosystem

    • plugin metadata for consumption by Avogadro is listed in the [tool.avogadro] table

    • some information is read from the normal [package] table e.g. the author information

  • avogadro.toml – an Avogadro-specific metadata file

    • metadata is all stored at the top level of the file (see the examples in this repository)

• For Python plugins, it is recommended to use pyproject.toml as the metadata file.

  • If preferable, Python plugins may also use avogadro.toml. If both avogadro.toml and pyproject.toml are found in the plugin’s directory, avogadro.toml will take precedence and pyproject.toml will be ignored.

• For non-Python plugins, avogadro.toml must be used.