<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Joseph Wakeling <<a href="mailto:joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net">joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net</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">Aaron Bentley wrote: > Maritza Mendez wrote: >> I understand what you are saying. Requiring bzrtools to test against >> bzrRC is fine. But we still need a mechanism to help people decide when >> upgrading makes sense for them. That's what I was really trying to say. > > Upgrading in what context? If you're using the debs from the PPAs, > you'll always have a known-good combination. Same if you're using the > Windows .exe installer. </div>Well, the motivation for my original post is that this is not quite so... Ubuntu distros contain a number of bzr plugins that are not in the PPA. In my case that plugin was bzr-rebase, which is recommended (but not required) by bzr-svn. Upgrading to the latest bzr means upgrading to the latest bzr-svn, which requires a newer bzr-rebase. So, the _strict_ dependencies are met -- there's nothing internally contradictory between the PPA packages -- but they do clash with other bzr-related packages in the distro itself. The only general solution I can see for this is to mandate that all bzr-related packages in the distro must also be maintained in the PPA, which I guess is tricky since the Ubuntu packaging team, the plugin developers and the core bzr development team would all have to coordinate around this. (After all, you have no control over what whacky plugins the Ubuntu devs decide to include in the distro.) But it does make sense to me to want to define a wider set of core plugins which will always be packaged in the PPA in versions compatible with the latest bzr. If it's not desirable to have so many plugins in the main PPA then perhaps there could be a 'use at own risk' bzr-plugins PPA which plugin developers could upload to independent of the main bzr team ... ? </blockquote></div> 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. 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. -M