Re: [BuildStream] [Proposal] Plugin fragmentation / Treating Plugins as Sources

[William Salmon <will salmon codethink co uk>]

Could i get some feed back on this please. I have tried to keep it much 
more focused than last time but it seems to have ended up being a bit of 
a ramble again...

On 11/04/2019 13:35, Tristan Van Berkom via buildstream-list wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm afraid this is going to be a long and beefy proposal, I have
> included a couple of TLDRs inline for those who want to gloss over
> this.

Indeed, it is very long. I am very interested in this topic and have 
tried to engage with this thread several times. But I have struggled to 
keep track of the thread and I must confess to not really understanding 
the details of your proposal. It is not only myself that dose not have 
the capacity for this email. Other reply seems to have said a similar thing.

Before this thread got too technical I would like to have had a 
opportunity to have joined the architectural discussion.

From my perspective, as a user of may open source projects, I do not 
expect my OS to give me cutting edge versions of programs and I really 
don't expect it to have multiple versions of the same software so I am 
really confused as to why build stream is trying so hard to go so far 
above and bond when we have plenty of big challenges already.

As a user of buildstream at work and occasionally at home I have been 
running bst 1.2 and bst master side by side for different projects for 
months in separate venv's.

I have found this very easy to set up, and use. But I am very familiar 
with python, (maybe not by this groups standards but certainly by our I 
have target users standers)

When I contrast this to other opensource projects, even those with 
sponsorship and a supportive user base that I have used personally, were 
trying out master close to the release  date requires compiling them for 
a hour or two i think the venv model works really well.

For people who really want to have a system wide bst 1.2 and master then 
there are other solutions like docker or vm's that also work well.

From my perspective I think getting bst2 to be great so that we don't 
have to support a long transition would be a much better model, we 
already have loads of great features and some more on the way, we have 
had a fair delay since 1.2 so we are not messing our users about too 
regularly.

Getting bst2 really good might need us to change the plugin model but I 
have really struggled to follow the discussions that far.

Regards

Will