On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 19:06:01 +0100, Nicolas Pouillard wrote: > Excerpts from Eric Kow's message of Wed Nov 04 18:38:33 +0100 2009: > > > * Git ones are more UNIXy, first you have separated commands git-foo, > > > they are > > > maybe hidden in some libexec directory, they may reuse the core library > > > (or > > > not), and they are spawned by the main command.
> > I think I was thinking more of the git-style plugins: > > Great, then. > > > http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1504 Actually, darcs plugins (in my original proposal) would be even less ambitious than git style plugins in that Darcs will never assume that there is a standard place to look into to grab a plugin. Instead, we want to use something I believe is called a 'forcing function' (*) to make users consciously aware that they're installing a third party plugin that isn't part of Darcs proper. The forcing function in question would be to require plugins to be specified in the user configuration, something like this: frobnicate /home/me/darcs-frobnicator.py show index /usr/local/bin/hashed-storage-show-index show authors /usr/local/bin/darcs-show-authors delta-debug /usr/local/bin/even-better-than-bisect (*) If you're a real UI guy, please forgive me if I've misunderstood the idea as explained by Donald Norman and abused the terminology > > I'll note also that I'm not terribly attached to the idea of darcs > > plugins. I just thought it could relieve some pressure to implement new > > functionality, and also in some sense extend the Darcs hacker community > > beyond the Haskell-friendly world. But I imagine it also leads to some > > interesting new problems that we may not be prepared to solve. > > What new problems do you have in mind? I don't see plugins causing troubles, > providing an accessible core library on the other end will leads to > interesting problems, but this is not really caused by plugins. I'm not very clear on this, but one thing I'm worried about is that in the real world, nobody's going to pay attention to what is darcs and what's a plugin. Because people are naturally inattentive, darcs plugins will effectively *be* darcs, as far as users are concerned if we're not careful about it. I worry that this would get us into trouble somehow. I think in general, I'm thinking more of social problems than technical ones: how will plugins shape Darcs development in the future? What kinds of expectations will they create? How much liability will we have for them? What happens when plugins become de-facto standards? What about the plugin ghetto that Stephen mentioned? Despite these doubts, I still think this sort of change will open up some interesting/exciting possibilities for Darcs in the future. Make things a little bit more open-ended. -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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