pluggable sections

[Doug MacEachern <do...@covalent.net>]

i realize there are plenty of outstanding issues that require
attention, but i got this itch and had to scratch it..

as you'll see in the cvs commits, there is now support for pluggable
<Perl> sections.  the idea is that we will have a default handler,
which one can override.  i'll leave the implementation of the default
handler to anybody who is interested/able.  thinking the initial
prototype should be pure Perl.  can then be re-written in xs or have
an alternate xs implementation to the pure Perl one.  would be nice to
make it subclass-able, like a ModPerl::Registry for <Perl> sections.

one pita is that 2.0 parses the body of *every* <Container>, so the
code within <Perl> must be re-strung together before it is eval-ed.
the Apache::Directive->as_string method was added as a helper for
this, there's a chance that certain code can trip up the apache
parser.  but we can worry about that if/when it happens.
i had thought one could build an ap_directive_t* tree, rather than
generate strings of config that get parsed.  might still be possible,
but it looks like the latter will be more straight-forward and less
error-prone.

the other issue is that modperl_hook_init must be called earlier than
normal to handle <Perl> sections.  this means certain directives must
come before <Perl>, such as PerlSwitches.  i'll be putting some checks
in for stuff like that.

hopefully the test <Perl> handler in modperl_extra.pl will be a good
enough example to go on.  also notice there, the feature request of
being able to specify which package <Perl> code is compiled into can
be implemented by the handler like so:

<Perl handler=MyConfig,package=MyPackage>
...
</Perl>

sub MyConfig::handler {
    my($parms, $args) = @_;

    my $code = $parms->directive->as_string;
    my $package = $args->{package} || 'Apache::ReadConfig';

    eval "package $package; $code";
    ...

one could also do something like this:

<Perl handler=MyConfig>
...
</Perl>

sub MyConfig::handler : method {
     my($self, $parms, $args) = @_;

     my $package = ref($self) || $self;
     ...
}

have fun.


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