Dependencies in the PPA for Jaunty

[Andrew Cowie]

On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 14:35 -0700, Maritza Mendez wrote:

> I took Aaron's advice and went back to trusting the PPA's.  I really
> tried.  It was less than a day before I found myself driven back into
> the hard choices Joseph is describing.

At the risk of being off-topic, there are some views that I'd like to
offer.

1) Plugin architectures appear to be an anti-pattern
----------------------------------------------------

I know that the Bazaar hackers think their plugin system is brilliant.
And it is. It's mature, well thought out, and capable.

But the sort of confusion and pain being described on this thread is
very common as soon as anyone starts trying to *package* plugins.

[You think this is bad, you should try see what happens when Linux
distros try to wrap Eclipse plugins (let alone Firefox extensions) in
packages.]

Over and above the long-tail problem of trying to create and maintain
packages for all the plugins that are out there, the significant one is
the nightmare of trying to keep the versions in sync. It's RPM hell, all
over again.

So while the flexibility of plugins (not having to get your code into
mainline) may be lovely and helpful for people hacking on the ecosystem
around a project, it is no help at all to people trying to _use_ the
software — because they are trying to get that software from their
distro. Which, as this thread is explaining, can't provide it.


2) This isn't the first time this has happened
----------------------------------------------

We went through a period where people were in pain because bzrtools
wasn't in sync with bzr. Then it was bzr-svn. Now it's rebase. The
problem is systemic.


3) This is driving people away
------------------------------

Every time I contemplate running a Debian-based distro again I see a
thread like this. If "the version of bzr in Ubuntu is (always) too old +
the bzr PPAs don't work [as a formation]" then I it's harder for me to
get enthusiastic about adopting Ubuntu or recommending it to others.

Meanwhile, I can only speculate what this is costing in terms of
adoption, but this sort of thing can't be helping when it comes to
people considering Bazaar for their version control needs.


++

I realize that the plugin architecture has been really helpful for the
people hacking on bzr. Which is great. No one would quibble with the
sophistication of bzr's internal modularity. But I'm really not sure
that plugins (as a publicly visible mechanism thence requiring packaging
work) has lead to a good user experience.


AfC
Sydney

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