On 23.08.2015, at 11:44, Sacha Labourey <[email protected]> wrote:

> I understand this, but it forces new users to make a choice, when they are 
> likely not equipped to make a choice. So we are forcing a first download, a 
> choice, followed by another download (based on the choice she made), and 
> possibly a restart. That is convoluted to me. 

A UI like OS X Installer's optional 'Customize' may work here to really 
reinforce that there needn't be a choice. Just click 'Next' and you get the 
defaults. And plugin installation doesn't require a restart (except possibly in 
very rare cases).

That second 'step' could be pretty much hidden behind a progress indicator. 
It'll just take a few seconds (unless you're behind a proxy and then you're 
used to configuring all the things). It's not like we're asking the user to 
download and upload the plugins manually. Alternatively we package whatever is 
in the default set with the WAR, so it just needs to be extracted for a 
speedup. But this would imply that the default set definition is also bundled, 
when I'd prefer it to be downloaded from the primary update site on startup, so 
it can be updated (as installation of slightly outdated Jenkins releases is 
common due to LTS).

However, many of the choices you'd get with a reasonable set of default plugins 
are in fact rather necessary. Are you using Git, Mercurial, Subversion, 
Perforce, …? Are you using Maven, Ant, Gradle, …? Want integration with GitHub, 
GitLab, JIRA, HipChat, BitBucket, Gerrit, Docker, Jabber, Redmine, Slack, …? 
Just installing all of them would be possible, but I remember the instances 
I've run and how hesitant my coworkers were to change anything because they 
didn't understand everything they saw on the config page. It can become 
overwhelming pretty fast.

A large part of Jenkins' appeal is its plugin ecosystem and customizability. I 
don't think there's a need to hide that from new users; just that the initial 
selection should be curated to greatly reduce the complexity of the choices 
they make. Dumping them into today's plugin manager would be bad. But I think 
everyone is capable of selecting their SCM and build tool from a list of ~8 or 
so each. This should be a reasonable start for a majority of installations.

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