better messages about bad plugin names

[Martin Pool]

"Wichmann, Mats D" <email address hidden>
to bazaar

show details
  3:53 am (1 hour ago)

My first look at 0.15 wasn't terribly positive...

Unable to load plugin 'bzr-tags' from '/home/mats/.bazaar/plugins': It
is not a valid python module name.
Unable to load plugin 'bzr-gtk' from '/home/mats/.bazaar/plugins': It is
not a valid python module name.
Unable to load plugin 'pqm-submit' from '/home/mats/.bazaar/plugins': It
is not a valid python module name.
Unable to load plugin 'update-mirrors' from
'/home/mats/.bazaar/plugins': It is not a valid python module name.

The other plugins in my home directory are not
saying this.

What's up with this?

> >> I'm expecting people will go to the plugins page, do the
> >> branch using the link provided, and then get funky errors.
> >> Should plugin authors be renaming stuff now?

I think you're right. So what could we do to make this more obvious?

Really the 0.15 NEWS should have mentioned this under the heading of
'NOTES WHEN UPGRADING'; in the shipped version it does describe this
but not in a way that would let users understand why it broke or what
should have been done. For any change we should consider whether it
should be mentioned in NEWS and how - what the consequences to users
are.

   * Allow 'import bzrlib.plugins.NAME' to work when the plugin NAME has not
     yet been loaded by load_plugins(). This allows plugins to depend on each
     other for code reuse without requiring users to perform file-renaming
     gymnastics. (Robert Collins)

However that's moot because most users don't read most documentation. :-)

It would be better if the error said something like

 Can't load ~/.bazaar/plugins/bzr-gtk as a plugin because this isn't
a valid module name; try renaming it to bzr_gtk

through a simple substitution.

> There is also the fact that you wouldn't usually name the trunk/mainline
> as the project name. (for example
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzr-cvsps-import/trunk
> )
>
> Because of this, the recommended way of branching is to always supply a
> target name. Otherwise you would end up with 10 'trunk' projects.

Maybe that page should give the whole command you need to use to install it?

 bzr branch http://aouthaoenuth/bzr-foo/trunk ~/.bazaar/plugins/bzr_foo

Or we could have an install-plugin command as shorthand...

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Still current in 0.91dev.

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

r2984 of bzr.dev.