<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <<a href="mailto:stephen@xemacs.org">stephen@xemacs.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">Maritza Mendez writes: > I just keep thinking... bzr cannot be the only project which has faced this > challenge. Who are those projects and what can we learn from them? I don't > have a good project to offer as a role model yet. But I am sure they exist, > because this challenge has nothing to do with bzr especially and should be > universal to all projects with active plugin communities. </div>Er ... Debian? Ubuntu? Red Hat? Plugins are just DLLs by another name. So this is just the problem that distros face on a smaller scale, so you hope to do better than the more comprehensive distros do with their sprawling collections. </blockquote></div> Not really the same, I claim. Or, more precisely, large differences in scale bring qualitative as well as quantitative change. Those distros you mention are big sprawling projects as you say for which keeping track of deps could be a full-time job. Bzr is much more manageable because bzr plugins are good for exactly one thing: bzr. I don't see keeping track of bzr plugins as being all that hard. The real issue -- as others have pointed out -- is how to balance innovation in the developer community with reliability in the user community. That's a social question, not a technical question. -M