Bundling more plugins into bzrtools

[Robert Collins]

On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 18:26 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: 
> Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
> > Once you have a sensible plugin API, there ought to be
> > other ways to fetch the plugins (as in fact you can do
> > now, by branching the plugins in your .bazaar/plugins
> > directory, but that's not very elegant from an end-user
> > point of view).  There are numerous software systems 
> > that in fact manage plugins in a user-friendly way, 
> > I'm thinking Firefox and Eclipse to start with.
> > 
> Firefox and eclipse (and openoffice) plugin systems have good points and 
> bad.  On the plus side, these systems allow users to download plugins 
> without leaving the program's interface.  On the debit side, the plugin 
> downloads to a user specific area instead of a system wide area and 
> (initially) they are usually designed in such a way that it is hard for 
> distros that do want to package them to do so easily.
> 
> bzr probably wouldn't suffer from the second lack (seeing as its current 
> plugins are packagable) but the first one is difficult to impossible to 
> solve on a multiuser system.

Additionally external dependencies are really not suitable for per-user
tweaking. For instance, bzr-dbus needs a specific dbus binding version.
The right package for that is named and versioned differently on many
distros.

Distro level packaging can express all the required dependencies so that
when bzr-dbus is installed, so is dbus, python-dbus etc.

That said, work is under way to hook bzr plugin installation into the
system packaging systems.

-Rob

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