Re: Introducing NewStuffManager

["James \"Doc\" Livingston" <doclivingston gmail com>]

On Sat, 2006-10-07 at 13:09 -0600, Tom Tromey wrote: 
> What happens if a distro wants to ship a plugin?  I'm specifically
> thinking about upgrades and versioning, and making sure the manager
> does the right thing.  E.g., consider this scenario: the distro ships
> a plugin (version 1), then the user updates from the update site
> (version 2) into his home directory, and then the OS itself is
> upgraded, pulling in version 3.  (If this sounds far-fetched... I've
> done this multiple times with Eclipse plugins on Fedora.)

Just as important as what does happen is what should happen, which might
not be so clear-cut.

The situation you mentioned looks like the user wants to have the newest
version, so using the distro-installed 3.0 plugin would be what they
probably want. However having 2.0 in their home dir and 3.0 globally
installed might be something different: maybe they don't like 3.0 and
wanted to revert to 2.0, or their home dir is used across multiple
machines and they want 2.0 on all of them.



> How does this relate to python eggs[2]?  And if it doesn't, why not?
> It seems to me that if there's an upstream project that handles a lot
> of this, then it would be beneficial to simply re-use it.

For Python plugins that could work, but do we want to support things
other than Python? I'll ignore natively compiled (i.e. C) plugins since
they get icky.

The applications that the OP mentioned, Deskbar, Gedit and Epiphany (and
Rhythmbox, which is a potential non-Desktop client) use Python, but what
about other things? Evolution, Banshee et al use Mono-based plugins,
some other app might use Java plugins, should they be able to use
NewStuffManager too?


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that
would also stop you from doing clever things.