Hi Paul,

Paul van Tilburg a écrit :
> Hello Olivier,
> 
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 02:36:02PM +0100, Olivier Tilloy wrote:
>> Thanks, and sorry for the late reply. Have you checked out the latest
>> release (0.5.32)?
> 
> I have, and also 0.5.33 by now. ;)
> 
> 
>>> I am one of the Debian Elisa maintainers and am not sure how to deal
>>> with the update system yet.  I've talked about it with some of you
>>> on the IRC, but it might be better to discuss it here.
>> Indeed there is a lot to be discussed.
>>
>>> It seems there are a few issues here:
>>>
>>> 1) There are plugins that are not distributed via -good, bad, or -ugly
>>>    AFAIK (apple_trailers, ted, etc.).  For this the plugin (update)
>>>    system is essentially an installer for extra functionality that users
>>>    can select.  If these plugins are never pulled into -good, -bad or
>>>    -ugly, they should be updated once the user installs them.  Either
>>>    that, or we start distributing these plugins also.
>> The plugin distributed externally are indeed never going to be shipped
>> in -good, -bad, -ugly. In fact for some of them (and we hope most of
>> them in the future) we don't even ship them, just link to them in our
>> plugin repository. That allows us to easily bring to the users the best
>> of the community developments.
>> Now, I would say that's up to each distro to decide whether they find
>> some external plugins good and interesting enough (and
>> license-compatible) to ship them in external packages.
> 
> I plan to package some of the plugins, as long as there is not demand, I
> see no problem there.  So, I think we can agree that even for an Elisa
> instance distributed by some distribution such as Debian, plugins still
> need to be available.  That's why I haven't set update_plugin_cache to
> False, just doesn't feel right to do so.
> 
>>> 2) [...] Does Elisa to plugin  cleaning?
>> Currently not, that's something we need to implement. See
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/elisa/+bug/309161.
> 
> Ah, ok.. subscribed.
> 
>>> 3) Is Elisa aware of plugins (including the core) being not user but
>>>    distribution installed?  
>> Yes. Basically, at startup plugins are going to be searched in the
>> PYTHONPATH + ~/.elisa-0.5/plugins/.
>> If a more recent version of a distribution installed plugin is found in
>> ~/.elisa-0.5/plugins/, it is going to supersede it.
> 
> Right.  But since people can arbitrarily change PYTHONPATH, there is
> not a real two-step search of dist plugins and then user plugins.
> So, it's not so easy to do as I initially thought.

Not really. But we have countless issues with this PYTHONPATH black
magic we are doing internally, and I'm thinking of some cleanup to fix
all that (but that's a background, not high priority task).
Cleaning this up would eventually allow to implement a two-step search
for plugins, for example.

>>> If (3) is the case, we could maybe have an mode between completely
>>> unawareness of any plugin updates at all and full plugin upgrades and
>>> access to new plugins that Elisa has now, namely a 'dist' mode where
>>> dist plugins are never upgraded, only new plugins can be installed and
>>> updated.  Also plugins that become 'dist' plugins at some point can be
>>> cleaned automatically.
>> That's a possibility indeed, that would require some modifications to
>> the plugin registry. In fact I want to clean it up at some point, and
>> this feature could be implemented at this point. Can you please open a
>> bug report explaining the idea, and assign it to me?
> 
> So I've thought about this more.  And it seems quite an elegant solution
> to me.  At build time the eggs get the extra metadata flag 'dist' or
> 'vendor', and when newer versions of the same plugin are found they are
> discarded or the 'dist' one is considered the newest.  Either way, this
> would result in only adapting the "comparision function".  However, I am
> unaware of the current implementation.

That goes down to what you state, basically adapting the comparison
function.

> Should I write the above in the bug report?  Let me know. :)

Yes please!

> For me, not being able to block updates of these 'dist' plugins is the
> main issue that prevents me uploading Elisa 0.5.x to Debian Sid.  So, I
> hope we can work out the above the idea or something completely
> different.  Even a temporary solution is fine, it doesn't have to be
> perfect in one attempt, right?  :)

Anyway I think it will have to be a stepwise process if we want to get
to a perfect plugin management in Elisa.

> Kind regards,
> Paul

Cheers,

Olivier

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