[rfc] don't test plugins by default

[John A Meinel]

Martin Pool wrote:
> I find that I almost always run 'bzr --no-plugins selftest', just
> because there tends to be at least one plugin that is out of date
> relative to my development branch at any time.  I expect other people
> have this too.
> 
> Being able to have tests for plugins and check them against an
> uninstalled copy of bzr is nice, but I don't think it should be the
> default.
> 
> I propose to change selftest so that it doesn't test plugins unless
> something like 'bzr selftest --plugins' is given.  (Plugins might still
> cause breakage by overriding commands, but that's more serious so I
> don't mind leaving it in.)
> 

Actually, I tend to run:
BZR_PLUGIN_PATH='' ./bzr selftest

Because older version of bzr would spawn another bzr instance, and not
pass on the --no-plugins flag. :)
I have to do it because my short-log plugin causes cmd_log to be
overridden, which breaks all of the tests that expect non-decorated
behavior.

In a perfect world, there would be a way to detect that selftest was
running, and the plugins could choose whether or not to load themselves.
And all the rest would always be up-to-date. :)

On the other hand, knowing that you have broken a plugin is something
that I think the developers need to know about. One of the major desires
to get something like changesets into mainline (which I've started a new
branch for, because I wanted to refactor the code), is because everytime
we decide to do a major refactoring, all of the plugins break. And while
the person refactoring always makes sure that all tests pass on the bzr
branch, it still can break a lot of functionality.

Hiding the breakage by not testing plugins is probably the wrong way to
handle it.
I believe that your idea is that plugins are frequently someone else's
code, that you aren't really maintaining.
That is probably a reasonable statement to make, and I'm not really sure
how to reconcile the two issues.

John
=:->


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