Dependencies in the PPA for Jaunty

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Vincent Ladeuil writes:

 > People that don't want to handle additional dependencies should
 > keep their $HOME/.bazaar/plugins directory as empty as possible
 > and pester PPA maintainers and <favorite distro>
 > maintainers. Keep in mind that many of them work in their spare
 > time though.

Of course they do.  So what?  The fact that they're volunteers just
increases the number of buggy and/or out of date "official" plugin
packages, giving the users more headaches.  Knowing why reality sucks
doesn't kill the pain, though.

What Andrew is asking is "is it possible that a batteries-included
approach by the Bazaar maintainers would lead to a substantially
better user experience at a modest cost in either (a) additional
maintainer time and effort, or (b) lower functionality than is
(sometimes) possible with the core + plugin approach?"

Python does that; it works pretty well, although there are always
people carping about it.  (Which reminds me: Maritza, you might want
to look at PEP 376, the "distribution PEP".)  Emacs does that,
although for political rather than effectiveness reasons.  Again it
works pretty well.  XEmacs, on the other hand, has unbundled (not
quite a plugin architecture, but sort of a prototype of that), and
it's been very popular with our users.

My guess is that bzr is "shared infrastructure" rather than "personal
preference" and as such the more stable "batteries included" approach
deserves consideration.