Bzr plugins *must* die!

[Joseph Wakeling]

Robert Collins wrote:
> Firstly, please normalise this by the number of releases they do.
> Firefox for instance breaks hugely more for me than bzr ever does.

That's true, but on the other hand the social and professional
separation between Mozilla's core devs and the creators of plugins is
much greater, no...?  So there's a different social perception (which of
course may not be fair or reflect the technical issues actually faced).

> This of course won't help or hinder packaging issues, which really are
> separate.
> 
> In particular, I think the bug you ran into is a known issue with PPA's
> - once an upload is made the old version disappears immediately, and
> aptitude cannot 'hold' an old version sensibly when there are
> cross-package dependencies.

Part of the problem is that bzr and its main plugins reside in the same
PPA so surely in such a case there's a responsibility to ensure
cross-compatibility -- especially when it's a metadata rather than
coding issue.

I mean -- just out of curiosity -- how much of a pain is it to ensure
that, where code compatibility is not the issue, the packages on the
main PPA all have compatible dependencies at the point that the latest
bzr release is uploaded?

I don't particularly want to see plugin developers forced to merge into
bzr-core but compatibility assurance on the PPA is surely a good
compromise...?