Hi everyone,
While it is a much desired feature to have an initial setup experience that
includes the ability to choose plugins, I'd rather not overwhelm inexperienced
users by exposing them to the full list of plugins from the start. Forcing
those with no experience to choose between 1000+ plugins before they can even
start using Jenkins is an impossible task. They may not even be fully aware
what plugins are for, and that Jenkins doesn't really do much without any of
them. Who points them to Folders, Timestamper, or Build Timeout Plugin? Sure,
they can always accept the defaults, but what if they want to modify something
that should be simple enough, like add support for a less popular SCM like
Mercurial?
A selection of known good plugins is a much better choice for this particular
setup dialog, and that's how it's currently implemented. The initial selection
of 'curated' (= available for selection) plugins was provided to Gus and Tom by
me (and tweaked by them after some early reviewer feedback). I used the stats
data[1] as a starting point and then tried to define useful categories for
them. Those aren't always perfect, but should be close enough to work. The
specific selections were made based on the following criteria:
- Is the plugin useful, and does it actually work? (Mostly approximated by
install count)
- Does the plugin integrate well with Jenkins? Does it work well in secured and
distributed Jenkins?
- Are the features it provides useful to someone fairly new to Jenkins?
- Even if it's not popular, is it a reasonably common SCM? (SCM's are so
fundamental to successful Jenkins use that these shouldn't be as heavily
restricted as some of the other categories.)
I admit the initial choices are somewhat colored by personal preferences, but
note that these are simply that -- initial choices to unblock Tom, Gus and
Keith, and get the discussion going. I also requested the data be moved into
the update site, so we can review the choices periodically and update to what
we consider the best choices of plugins for new users. This may not make it
into the first version, but would then be added shortly afterwards.
Likewise, the plugins to be selected for installation by default are a subset
of the curated list. For the SCMs, I used the 2014 Eclipse survey[2] to
determine what's popular. Otherwise I selected a list of what I considered most
universally useful, things that have people wondering why they're not core
features. Again, despite the criteria above, there's probably some personal
bias in this selection, but I'm not sure there's a much better way to provide a
first draft.
So please take a look at the current choices and let us know what you think:
https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/blob/unbundling-plugins/war/src/main/js/api/plugins.js
Do you think the criteria above aren't really useful? Do you have other
suggestions for the categories, the curated list of plugins, or the default
selection? Please let us know. If you're proposing specific changes, please
provide some details -- don't just ask why some plugin isn't part of the list.
Thanks in advance,
Daniel
1: http://stats.jenkins-ci.org/jenkins-stats/svg/201508-top-plugins1000.svg
2: http://www.slideshare.net/IanSkerrett/eclipse-community-survey-2014 slide 24
On 29.09.2015, at 16:31, Tom Fennelly <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Falling out of the "Revisiting bundled plugins" thread, we now have ongoing
> work in PR #1822 (Keith Zantow, Gus Reiber and myself) to unbundle plugins
> from Jenkins core. As part of that, we are working on adding a Plugin Install
> Wizard as a way of making it easy to configure the initial set of plugin in
> Jenkins (for new or existing users).
>
> Here's a short (rough) video showing the wizard: https://youtu.be/9pq5tHm4nWs
>
> Keith did all the UI work with help from Gus, so kudos to them.
>
> Also, please download and try he build from the CI server: jenkins.war.
>
> Regards,
>
> T.
>
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