It is possible for a build tree to declare one or more of its plugins to be global. The effect of declaring an item to be a global plugin is the same as having it be listed as a plugin for every build tree in the forest. [55] Global plugins should be used extremely sparingly, though there are some cases in which their use may be appropriate. For example, if a particular project requires certain environment setup to be done, it would be possible to create a global plugin that checks to make sure it is correct. It is often also appropriate to declare platform or platform type plugins globally so that dependent trees can be built with the declared compiler plugin.
A build tree can declare one of its plugins to be global by
following the plugin name with -global in the
plugins entry of
Abuild.conf, as in
plugins: global-plugin -global
When a build item is declared as a global plugin, abuild disregards access checks based on tree dependencies. In this sense, the affect of global plugins may “flow backwards” across tree dependencies. This is yet another reason that they should be used only for enforcing project-wide policy.
[55] In fact, this is how abuild implements this internally. As such, certain error conditions in global plugins may be repeated once for each build tree. This is unfortunate, but fixing it doesn't seem worth the trouble for reporting what are likely to be infrequent problems with what is likely to be a rarely used feature.