[RFC] bzr plugins pack for windows && plugins metainfo requirements proposal

Vincent Ladeuil v.ladeuil+lp at free.fr
Tue Dec 11 20:04:15 GMT 2007


>>>>> "john" == John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:

    john> Vincent Ladeuil wrote:
    >>>>>>> "bialix" == Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> writes:
    >> 
    >> <snip/>
    >> 
    bialix> webdav		not compatible with 1.0 [1]			no?
    >> 
    >> Not compatible with pack format*.
    >> 
    >> <snip/>
    >> 
    bialix> [1] each time webdav emits this message to console:
    bialix> not installing http[s]+webdav:// support (only supported for bzr
    bialix> 0.92 and above)
    >> 
    >> Good, that was unforeseen but welcome.
    >> 
    >> Vincent
    >> 
    >> *: And there are chances that it stays that way since making it
    >> compatible requires to add xml parsing capabilities which is non
    >> trivial at the moment (and/or requires more time than I can find
    >> on that subject).

    john> You could cheat and just return [] for listdir. It
    john> would still *work* even if it lets your obsolete-packs
    john> directory get bloated.

Yeah I thought about that too, but given that the population of
webdav users is small (null ?) I guess it will be used where only
webdav is available so I thought I should at least mention that
using packs will require cleaning the obsolete-packs once in a
while anyway (avoiding race conditions by killing a chicken first
of course). Gee, that's a nice plugin ! Let's use it for my loved
pet project !

    john> It seems a little silly to completely disable it for this.

That's my John, calling me silly ;-)

You may think once again that I'm trying too hard, but my aim in
participating to the project is to have pleasure doing it and
providing bogus solutions doesn't fit the bill. I have to do that
far too much for my taste in RL, thank you.

Here webdav doesn't provide list_dir(), the only use in bzr is
for obsolete-packs, so, yes, I can blindly release a webdav
plugin which happily return [] for any list_dir, doesn't pass the
test suite and may become quite dangerous to use the day bzr
decides that 'Hey, list_dir is available for writable transports,
so let's use it more !' boom.

So returning [] is clearly plan B. I also investigated
implementing it properly but as I said, I don't have the time to
do that with 1.0 at the corner of the week.

But let's come back a bit on your arguments:

    john> The next push over something other than webdav would
    john> clean it up.

Which suppose that the webdav server can also serve a bzr branch
with either ftp (tried it with packs lately ? Feel the pain of
using wrapped StringIO to implement readv ?), sftp, bzr+ssh,
bzr+http or (my god !) bzr.

Why the hell will they use webdav ? *That* be silly.

    john> As would someone manually (or by cron) running 'bzr
    john> pack' [not over webdav]. Or a cron job to just delete
    john> entries in that directory.

Same here, if you can run bzr or set a crontab, you don't use
webdav either.

As you can see plan B is quite weak.

On the other hand, I didn't say I will stop supporting the
plugin, I just said, it's on the backburner for now. And remember
that the plugin was started at a time where:

1) the smart server was only talked about, 

2) Many things were missing in bzrlib itself.

So, since then, I tried to address (2) by adding persistent
connections, authentication that do not force users to embed
their password in the url nor typing it (even once for each bzr
commands), that in turn made me work on providing a better test
infrastructure for the test suite and, let's face it, I get
side-tracked ;-)

But my point is that the plugin is was still alpha quality (there
is still no doc on how to install it and there is a serious
caveat to be aware of when using it on stock apache 2.x server
(namely the DirectorySlash option should be set to
off)). Remember the last time you hear me promoting it ? Me
neither. Add list_dir on top of that...

In the mean time, the smart server became a reality and quite
frankly, there is less and less interest for anybody to use
webdav.



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