Sean wrote:
Hmm.. It's pretty easy to test out Git ideas too. People do it all
the time, and without plugins. Junio maintains several such trees
for instance. Dunno.. I just think plugs _sounds_ good to developers
without much real benefit to users over regular ole source code.
Example time!
There's a plugin for Bzr which adds support for Cygwin-compatible symlink support on Windows. (IIRC, this involves monkey-patching some of the Python standard library bits).
Now, this is something which is *proposed* as a feature to be merged into upstream bzr, and it may happen at some point. That said, when I have a Windows-using coworker who wants to check out a repository that has symlinks in it (with his win32-native, no-cygwin-required bzr upstream binary), I don't need to tell him to go download and build bzr from a third party; instead, I just need to tell him to run a single command to check out the plugin in question into the bzr plugins folder.
From an end-user convenience perspective, it's a pretty significant win.