[RFC] Automatic Plugin Suggestion

[Martin Pool]

The original goal of this project is to suggest plugins when someone
installs from the default Bazaar tarball.  If this list is not shipped
in the Bazaar tarball but requires special configuration, or
installing a plugin,  or getting Bazaar from a distribution rather
than upstream, it is fundamentally missing the point.

I think the most practical way to have that shipped in 1.3 is to put a
table of plugins in the bzr tree, and print out the relevant one when
needed.  This does not cause a problem for distributors.  We should
make sure it is possible to amend or override the table from a plugin.

It's acceptable that sometimes we will suggest a plugin that does not
actually do what the user wants, may not work well or at all on their
platform, may have bugs, may be out of date, may be a lower standard
than bzr itself.  It is only a suggestion.

Updates to this table are no more urgent than updates to any other
part of Bazaar.  It is spurious that plugins release asynchronously
from Bazaar -- Bazaar itself develops asynchronously from its releases
but we don't have a special mechanism for getting fixes for particular
bugs, or new formats.  We just let people either install plugins, or
get the Bazaar releases, which are after all pretty regular.

-- 
Martin