Consolidating Mods (or, a Plugin Interface)

At least 8 current maintained DC mods (BCDC , StrongDC , ApexDC , and all of StrongDC ’s other immediate derivatives) exist which largely modify some cosmetic aspect of DC whilst keeping the core unchanged. Some, but not all, of their functionality could be implemented via a plugin interface which would allow many users of those mods to instead use the official DC client. This has advantages in terms of: bug reporting (rather than users in each client having to independently discover bugs, bug reporting could be more centralized) bug fixing (rather than a choice of either each mod author separately patching his client or syncing with DC when it might not be appropriate) security responsiveness (an important special case of bug fixing; especially a problem for second or third-tier derivatives which need to either wait for fixes to propagate down the mod dependency graph, remain vulnerable, or specifically re-implement some fix that will automatically appear for them in DC regardless) securit ...