Accessories: an extension architecture for Bazaar Explorer

[A. S. Budden]

On 31 January 2010 07:06, Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
> I'm highly excited to announce the availability of accessories, the cool
> new way to extend Bazaar Explorer. Accessories enable several things:
>
> * the ability to enable/disable optional out-of-the-box features
> * the ability for plugins to add features (and for these to be
>  optionally disabled if you don't want them)
> * a "wallet" for managing your personal extensions
> * a "hat" for path-aware extension activation.
>
> To test out this feature, grab rev 392 or later and experiment with the
> Accessories dialog under the File menu. (This replaces the old "Switch
> hat" menu btw.) It's also worth grabbing rev 272 of bzr-fastimport to
> see how a plugin can add goodies to the Tools menu.
>
> Currently, an accessory may provide bookmarks, custom editor settings,
> logos (additional icons) and tools. I plan to extend that in the future
> to include toolbars, logical kinds (e.g. being able to mark a branch as
> a 'review' branch or 'packaging' branch), context menus and more.
>
> I'm really proud of this feature and I hope you enjoy using it. For
> those of you that tried Explorer 0.1 and were curious about why I
> included a "hats" feature, I hope it now makes a lot more sense. In
> particular, these latest changes bring Explorer one step closer to being
> the "IDE-without-an-editor" vision I've had for it since day 0.

This looks very interesting: I'm very impressed.  I'll certainly look
forward to the toolbar configuration becoming customisable.  That
could be very useful.  For now, I'll certainly update my source
creator plugin to add itself to the tools menu automatically.  That
could be handy for the gradual trial role-out of Bazaar we're doing
here.

The only comment I have at the moment is that I find the
"clothes/hats/wallets/bags" thing really confusing.  I haven't really
got a better suggestion, but given that these are something people
will probably configure only rarely, I think they'll always need the
Introduction page just to explain what it all means.  Bazaar has far
too much confusing terminology already...

I rather like the idea of an IDE-without-an-editor, although I guess
it'll never remove the need to have an IDE for debugging type things.
Certainly a laudable goal though.  If only it were possible to
completely remove all the IDEs: there are quite a few people here who
use Bazaar Explorer for VCS management, Eclipse for editing and Keil
uVision (which has an appalling editor but fantastic peripheral
debugging stuff) for debugging!

Anyway, well done and I'll try to have more of a play and come back
with any other (positive or negative) comments.  In the meantime I've
merged the changes into my two outstanding merge requests to make
things a bit easier.

Cheers,

Al