It’s probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I’ll of course have the normal weekend features up.
In the meantime, here’s something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general. The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc. Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl’s CPAN. Nowadays, applications have their own plugins. For instance, a system with WordPress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with WordPress plugins that also require given PHP libraries. WordPress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation. You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm. Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.
How many levels could this go? Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve? There’s probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.