Should suggest when installing a plugin will help the user do what they are trying to do

[Martin Olsson]

It would be very useful if typing "bzr vis" without having bzr-gtk installed resulted in a nice error message saying "please install bzr-gtk to activate this functionality". Think about how bash prints "please install package `mercurial` to run command `hg`" etc etc.

I spent a long time today wondering if I just had an old bzr version or something. I saw graphviz being pulled in as a dependency to the core bzr package so I assumed the graphing functionality would be available in plain bzr without the GTK UI.

[Rich Wareham (richwareham)]

Indeed there is no such message printed although one could easily say the same about other bzr plugins. If there is no svn support for bzr installed, should attempting to use svn-specific features report a similar message?

[James Westby (james-w)]

Hi,

Thanks for the report, I have opened a bzr task for the bug as well.

Martin A. did some work on this with a view to having a plugin installer
as well.

Thanks,

James

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I think this is a dupe, but I can't seem to find the plugin registry bug
- perhaps we didn't write one.

Anyhow, bzr has the capability to recommend plugins, but we need a good
database written up - the plugin-info plugin has the code to extract
metadata from plugins for such a db.

-Rob