[RFC] Automatic Plugin Suggestion

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 11:14 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> The original goal of this project is to suggest plugins when someone
> installs from the default Bazaar tarball. 

I don't think the bulk of our users use the default tarball. We should
be aiming to suggest plugins for most of our users sensibly, not just
those using 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.

Whats in the tarball is not what is in our source tree [we generate .c
files for compilation]. We can make further changes as I suggested, and
I fully support having something in the tarball that works out of the
box.

> 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.

You've switched from tarball to source tree here, and thats where I have
been raising my objections. Its also harder to remove something than it
is to add it for distributors.

> 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 platform, may have bugs, may be out of date, may be a lower standard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.

Being a suggestion doesn't make the quality of the suggestions and their
installability reflect any less on bzr.

> 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.

I disagree here; doing updates of all of bzr to long lived stable
releases in distributions is non trivial.

-Rob

-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
> 
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