Maybe it's not surprising that people in your community have trouble understanding this. Let me see if I get it:

There is a big script made up of source files, and people write mods to the script by composing directives to add or replace chunks of content that are keyed by specific lines that appear in the (pre-modified) source files. These directives take the form of "plug-ins", which will be loaded and applied to the sources by a perl script, known here as "Main.pl".

The problem is that sometimes there are two or more mods implemented in these plug-ins that apply to the same key lines of source data, and you're looking for a way to make sure that a plug-in that adds content at a given key line will be applied before some other plug-in that changes that key line to something different.

So, how well do the members of this community know each other? Do they keep track of what the others are doing? What's to keep them from creating plug-ins that are mutually incompatible, no matter how well coordinated your Main.pl can be?

Assuming that some folks finish their plug-ins before others, it would make a lot of sense for others to base their efforts on the latest, most updated version of the content. In other words, make sure that each modification/plug-in is time-stamped, apply them in the order in which they were created, and only allow new mods to be defined with reference to the result of all existing mods. This would not require a parent-child process design (but the proper design should probably look like a CVS or RCS setup).

I'm sorry if I've missed the point entirely, but I hope you can see how I came to this interpretation of your post, and can provide a clearer explanation of the problem.

In reply to Re: Re: Inserting one script's info into another script's output by graff
in thread Inserting one script's info into another script's output by SleepyDave

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