RFC: shipping external-tree plugins

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 02:20:51PM +1000 I heard the voice of
Robert Collins, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> Is it the fact of dependencies that makes you inclined to not
> include bzrtools as bundled? 

Well.  Combination of things.  The added dependancies are one (though
they're all at least potentially optional, depending on which parts of
bzrtools you care about working).

Another one is that it essentially means eliminating the package for
bzrtools itself; it would then conflict with bzr, and installing it
without bzr is senseless, so it's never installable.  And that means
that, for packaging purposes, bzrtools no longer ever has any releases
or updates, and doesn't exist by itself; it's just part of bzr.

If that's the way we're deciding to go, well, than that's the way
we're going, and I'll go ahead and reorganize the packages to suit.
But it sounds as if that's not quite where we're trying to go, so
doing a little build-time surgery to keep bzrtools bzrtools seems like
the path I'd take.


In theory at least, the same objections would apply to other things
pulled in, like bzr-stats or the like.  In practice though, since
they're (a) tiny, (b) lacking additional dependancies, (c) may not
have semi-regular (or indeed _any_) releases, and (d) not separately
packaged anyway, the problem doesn't really come up.


> I think the key points from an upstream perspective are:
>  - we want [set of bundled things] to be the default minimum install

Well, as above; from a packaging perspective, this would mean
"bzrtools [or whatever other package] no longer exists except as a
built-in part of the bzr distribution".

If that's actually the stance intended, then my gripes are based on
misunderstanding.  I didn't read it as intending to go that far, and
trying to go partway is riding Roman.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.