[RFI] Popular Plugins Guide

Ian Clatworthy ian.clatworthy at canonical.com
Thu Aug 13 08:38:53 BST 2009


While core Bazaar doesn't ship with many plugins, our platform specific
installers are beginning to bundle quite a few and there is agreement in
principle that we should bundle more of them. Right now, there's limited
packaging of the documentation for those plugins so *casual* users often
don't know about their existence.

While refreshing our documentation for the 1.0 release, I added a
section to the User Guide introducing some popular plugins. Time
permitting (yeah right), I *could* continue down that path for 2.0 but
I'd like to suggest an alternative, a "Popular Plugins Guide".

This manual would basically be reference material (help topics) for a
collection of agreed plugins, one per chapter. The start of each chapter
would be the plugin help topic itself, followed by the help for each
command provided by that plugin. Technically, this is now really simple
for me to do, given a script I wrote yesterday to turn a list of help
topics into sphinx-compatible ReST. Maintenance-wise, I like it as well
because each plugin will provide its documentation, rather than me
needing to write a special "intro" topic in the User Guide.

Does this idea have merit? Would users find it helpful?

If so, what plugins should I thrown into the original cut? I'm thinking
something like:

* plugins bundled in the core (launchpad, etc.)
* BzrTools
* Loggerhead
* the plugins listed on http://bazaar-vcs.org/Roadmap/BatteriesIncluded
* bzr-svn
* bzr-git
* bzr-upload
* bzr-search

Note: I haven't included bzr-fastimport, bazimport, etc. because I'm
covering those in a separate Data Migration Guide that's coming soon.

Ian C.



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