What's up with plugins and 0.15?

[Martin Pool]

On 4/5/07, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:

> >> I'm expecting people will go to the plugins page, do the
> >> branch using the link provided, and then get funky errors.
> >> Should plugin authors be renaming stuff now?

I think you're right.  So what could we do to make this more obvious?

Really the 0.15 NEWS should have mentioned this under the heading of
'NOTES WHEN UPGRADING'; in the shipped version it does describe this
but not in a way that would let users understand why it broke or what
should have been done.  For any change we should consider whether it
should be mentioned in NEWS and how - what the consequences to users
are.

    * Allow 'import bzrlib.plugins.NAME' to work when the plugin NAME has not
      yet been loaded by load_plugins(). This allows plugins to depend on each
      other for code reuse without requiring users to perform file-renaming
      gymnastics. (Robert Collins)

However that's moot because most users don't read most documentation. :-)

It would be better if the error said something like

  Can't load ~/.bazaar/plugins/bzr-gtk as a plugin because this isn't
a valid module name; try renaming it to bzr_gtk

through a simple substitution.


> There is also the fact that you wouldn't usually name the trunk/mainline
> as the project name. (for example
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzr-cvsps-import/trunk
> )
>
> Because of this, the recommended way of branching is to always supply a
> target name. Otherwise you would end up with 10 'trunk' projects.

Maybe that page should give the whole command you need to use to install it?

  bzr branch http://aouthaoenuth/bzr-foo/trunk ~/.bazaar/plugins/bzr_foo

Or we could have an install-plugin command as shorthand...

-- 
Martin