Bzr plugins *must* die!

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 10:47 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > This sounds more like a specific packaging bug to me rather than a
> > structural problem.
> 
> The fact that I have hit problems like this dozens of times over
> the last many years is an indication that this is a systemic
> problem.
> 
> When I first started using Bzr, I would pull the sources from
> the bzr.dev repo. I stopped doing this regularly because it
> kept breaking my plugins.
> 
> I then started only using the bzr installed with apt-get. When I 
> needed to use bzr on the same source tree with both Dapper and
> Hardy, I had to use the backported ppa repo for Dapper because
> the default Dapper version was too old to work with the Hardy
> version.
> 
> Rob has also suggested I try bzr-loom, but because of the problems
> I have had over the years I don't like using a plugin I can't
> install as a package. I tend to become dependant on plugins and
> I need stability.
FWIW, bzr-loom will be packaged in intrepid.

> Despite what I think is a pretty conservative approach to plugin
> usage, I'm still getting bitten.
I would say conservative is whatever is provided by your distribution.
There haven't been breakages like this in released versions of Debian or
 Ubuntu. 

> > Pulling code into bzr.dev has other consequences as well though; it
> > becomes harder to contribute to those plugins (review etc for bzr.dev)
> > and it becomes harder to change their UI because of backwards
> > compatibility requirements.
> Well isn't better for the developers to face those problems than
> the users? :-)
It means a slow-down of the development of these plugins and a barrier
for changes. That affects users as well.

> > For some of the bzrtools commands that have proven themselves, that
> > What other plugins would you suggest to be merged into core ?
> I use bzr_difftools about a hundred times a day. Fortunately its small
> and simple so I can fix an version problems that arise. Obviously,
> that
> would not be true for more complex plugins.
Which specific complex plugins would you want to see merged though? I
think shelve is already on the list of candidates to be merged into bzr
core.

> I use and rely on dozens of tools and applications every day. None
> of these other tools break anywhere near as often as Bzr. Don't
> you see that as a QA issue? If you do, then isn't it time to look
> for a solution.
Do you run nightly snapshots of these tools? 

Cheers,

Jelmer
-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://samba.org/~jelmer/
Jabber: jelmer at jabber.fsfe.org