[MERGE][RFC] Enhanced hooks

[John Arbash Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> John Arbash Meinel wrote:
>> Remember that while centralized version control is "evil and wrong" :)
>> it does allow a single administrator to set things up for a bunch of
>> people.
> 
>> Hooks often fall into this "everyone should follow X" rules.
> 
>> My personal preference is to provide enough core support so that a
>> 3rd-party can write a plugin which does the "trust settings in branches"
>> for places that they want their users to trust. That way it doesn't have
>> to be trusted everywhere, and hopefully we don't have to get too
>> involved in hook ACLs and trust mechanisms.
> 
> I had imagined at some point we could extend the config mechanism so
> that people could mark locations as trusted in locations.conf.  I'm not
> sure whether that seems "too involved" to you.
> 
> But supporting an explicit central configuration might work even better
> than supporting particular instances of branches.conf.
> 
> Aaron

Well the general point is to avoid our current situation. Where to get 
post-commit emails, every developer needs to install and configure 
bzr-email. And to get pre-commit filtering, every developer needs to 
install X and configure it.

So an admin has to do this N times for N developers, rather than 1 time 
in a central location.

Having trusted locations might be sufficient.

My current idea is to have a site-config plugin which can be customized 
and get its own updates/install add-ons/etc.

We currently don't have a great story to tell admins who are setting up 
large deployments. It hasn't been something we've thought about a lot, 
because we've been working on giving power and flexibility to end users 
more than assistance for the admins.

I certainly think we can come up with lots of very tasteful solutions, 
we just need to spend some time thinking about it.

John
=:->