it might be nice to allow a user to activate/deactivate a plugin instead of having to uninstall and reinstall a plugin in particular cases. This would prevent having to reconfigure the plugin again. For example it might be nice to turn off LDAP authentication without having to uninstall the plugin.

These particular phases in a plugin’s lifecycle can probably be generalized to all plugins so could be something implemented in all plugins. Here we could have the descriptor either point to methods...