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Migrate core plugins to C?

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#692 0 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

@ItsZariep is already working on this.

Since Sep 10, 2025.

  • #694 by @ItsZariep — open

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
c, python
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked C rewrite and the reported libpeas Python loader failure affecting Text Size, Join Lines, and Open URI. The work is done when the affected core plugins are migrated to C and load without depending on the broken Python plugin loader while retaining their existing functionality.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

As the title says, it might be a good idea to migrate core plugins to C. In recent months, most rolling release systems, like Arch Linux, have broken Xed plugins because:

Remove python3 loader
The loader is nonfunctional as of pygobject 3.52 because the latter was ported to libgirepository-2.0, which cannot be loaded together with libgirepository-1.0, which libpeas still depends on.

As a consequence, core Xed plugins written in Python don’t load because the plugin loader fails:

(xed:19216): libpeas-WARNING **: 12:31:31.714: Failed to load module 'python3loader': /usr/lib/libpeas-1.0/loaders/libpython3loader.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(xed:19216): libpeas-WARNING **: 12:31:31.714: Could not load plugin loader 'python3'

** (xed:19216): WARNING **: 12:31:31.714: Failed to load builtin plugin: Text Size

** (xed:19216): WARNING **: 12:31:31.714: Failed to load builtin plugin: Join Lines

** (xed:19216): WARNING **: 12:31:31.714: Failed to load builtin plugin: Open URI

This has happened multiple times already, so I propose migrating these plugins to C, as some plugins, like Text Size, are fundamental features.

Plugins written in C don’t have this problem. I’m currently rewriting these plugins in C but I’m not sure if there are any considerations I should keep in mind during the process.

Dominant language
C
Stars
555
Forks
118
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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