Let engines ship their own initializers?

+1

In my opinion an initializer has to be inside the application because if you want to configure something, with what you propose, you would have to modify the engine initializer itself.

Francesc, I don't think that's always true.

For one thing you might set defaults in an engine intializer but make it so that people can overwrite it in the application.

Also, you might just want to use engine initializers as a place to wire things up, which needs to happen after engines are already fully loaded.

I have to agree with Sven. Currently I'm using the Desert plugin to be able to split our application apart and reuse parts of it in other applications. I'm looking forward to move to Rails 2.3 and port all this to engine plugins. Currently I'am manually loading all plugin classes esp. some classes need to register them self. For this case it would be helpful to have the plugin define which classes need to register them self instead of keeping track of it in the parent application.

Our client continues to use this feature in a production environment with multiple engines shared between multiple apps. We have had no issues arise, and wouldn't go back even if this patch was definitively rejected.

In my opinion this is an intuitive solution to the needs of engines (particularly as opposed to standard plugins), given that engines which provide controllers and models are likely more tightly integrated with apps.

As Francesc says, it's important that plugin initializers run first: Sven definitely got this part right

I've been thinking about it, and this makes sense as the "engine" has to boot and generate its environment.

For example in Typus I've a Typus.enable which makes the application configure for the first time, and then the application initializer is run, this could be done automaGIcally.

Definitelly +1 to see an initial patch to test how this can work. I would modify Typus to take advantage of this new feature.

Doesn't all the Railtie work in Rails 3.0 account for this? this could probably be marked as resolved.