releasing documentation: make check-dist-tarball and plugins

[Martin Pool]

2009/3/21 John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com>:
> He isn't bundling anything. "make check-dist-tarball" takes the tarball
> that "make dist" generated, extracts it into /tmp and runs "make check".
>
> The issue is that the new extraction also tests whatever plugins you
> happen to have installed in ~/.bazaar/plugins (or presumably in your
> site-wide configuration as well).
>
> Potentially 'make check-dist-tarball' should be running 'bzr selftest
> - --no-plugins' since it isn't otherwise isolating the release from the
> rest of your installation. (If you run bzr.dev, you probably have newer
> plugins as well, which may not be compatible with a 2-3 weeks-since-rc1
> bzr.)

Just giving --no-plugins is not a great solution because it will skip
tests for plugins that are shipped in that tarball.  (At the moment I
think this is just the launchpad one, but potentially there would be
more in future.)  And there have in the past been issues where the
isolation of --no-plugins was imperfect though Vincent may now have
fixed them.

I used to handle this by setting HOME before running them but that
won't block out systemwide plugins.

It might be good if there was a way to set the plugin path
exclusively, so that no other directories were consulted.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>