[drupal-devel] Module Review: spam_mtblacklist

[D. Moonfire]

I had a query, loosely related to this. I had this patch I was working
on (mainly because it led to something I think would be very useful)
that would allow a module to indicate if it had a requirement that was
not being fulfilled (such as another activated module, a PHP library, or
my personal problem, table structures). Since I haven't had any
experience with adding patches to Drupal, I was lurking in the mailing
list to get a feel for it.

Would it make sense to actually code up this? The basic idea was to
create a hook (preload?) that is called only on the module selection
page and only for activated modules. If the hook returns an error (I was
thinking an array of strings error messages for translation fun), the
module is automatically deactivated and a message is displayed.

As I original saw it:

spam_mtblacklist_preload()
{
  if (!module_exists("spam"))
  {
    return array("Requires the 'spam' module to be active.");
  }
}

I also thought it would be useful for the image module to precheck for
the PHP libraries or functions. Or for the taxonomy_access module to
make sure the patch is put in before it is activated. (Just ideas.)

Then, when the module is selected, it would automatically be unselected
with an error message. This is still a rough idea (i.e. I haven't
finished the code) since I'm a strong believer in implementing ideas for
workability before posting feature requests, but is this something that
would both fit somewhat into the Drupal framework and resolve this
problem?

Cheers,
Dylan

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 22:48 +0000, Michael Jervis wrote:
> Jeremy agreed it should be done as a separate module:
> 
> >> I've been thinking, I intend to implement this as a new module that 
> >> requires the spam module and works with it to keep the code modular 
> >> and separate. I think this is the right way to go as it allows the 
> >> functionality to be totally removed if people don't want it.
> >
> >I agree it should be a seperate module. 
> 
> Sadly drupal's contrib system doesn't allow to distribute them together. (I
> don't think)