RFC: shipping external-tree plugins

[Colin D Bennett]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:49:02 +1000
Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 02:42 -0500, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> 
> 
> > And that's bzrtools.  Imagine we ship something a lot lower profile,
> > like bzr-stats.
> > 
> > bzr-stats' "ancestor-growth" command is broken with bzr.dev/1.6 (it
> > wants get_revision_graph).  I'm not entirely sure WHAT that command
> > does.  The help doesn't tell me anything meaningful about the
> > output, and a glance at it gives me only a vague idea.  Even with
> > that, I don't know what I'd ever want to do with it.  It's probably
> > the most obscure command in a somewhat obscure plugin.  But since
> > it's shipped with bzr, the only way a new version can go out is if
> > a new bzr release is made with it.  Well, people could override it
> > themselves with their ~/.bazaar/plugins/, but the system-wide
> > installation is stuck, until the bzr team rolls a new bzr release.
> 
> I think that if/when bzr bundles plugins we will have to roll point
> releases to include fixes to the bundled plugins - its part and parcel
> of presenting more code to the user by default.

I *strongly* feel that bzr should be available separate from any
plugins.  However, can't a distro use a "metapackage" to package bzr
with some plugin packages?  For instance, on Ubuntu there is
'build-essential' which installs all the important packages to be able
to compile and link C programs.  On Gentoo, there is the concept of a
meta ebuild <http://gentoo-wiki.com/Meta_Ebuild> such as the KDE
package.

It would make sense to have the following packages, as an example of a
possible packaging scheme:

 bzr-core : this is bzr itself
 bzrtools : the bzrtools plugin
 bzr-gtk : the bzr-gtk plugin
 bzr : a metapackage that depends on the following:
     bzr-core
     bzrtools
     bzr-gtk ?
     etc.

For instance, if you are setting up a bzr (smart) server, there is no
reason to have bzrtools installed on it, right?  That's just more
things to maintain and be upgraded or break.  You might not want to have
GTK+ installed on a server, in fact, so no bzr-gtk plugin for you.

Regards,
Colin