371333 - Bugzilla needs a better way to manage extensions

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Extensions, enhancement)

Description

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

We want Bugzilla to be easily extendable, a lot like Firefox extensions.

We have all of the code stuff in place, pretty much, to make Bugzilla extendable. The thing missing is a repository for plugins and an easy way to install them!

One primary feature we'd need, in order for plugins to be popular, is the ability for a Bugzilla administrator to install plugins directly from the web interface, or at the worst, from some sort of installation package at the command line (or using some command-line tool).

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

It should first be easy to write plugins, which is currently not the case.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

need to be able to enable and disable plugins from the web ui, too.  Which probably means they need to be in self-contained packages, possibly with a specific directory structure in each one rather than having to drop files in various places around the bugzilla tree.

Comment 3

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

(In reply to comment #2)
> need to be able to enable and disable plugins from the web ui, too.  Which
> probably means they need to be in self-contained packages, possibly with a
> specific directory structure in each one rather than having to drop files in
> various places around the bugzilla tree.

  Yeah, I was thinking that, myself. In the ./extensions/ directory seems like a valid place. We'd just have to fix up TT to look for template hooks in ./extensions/*/template/en/hook/ and custom templates in ./extensions/*/template/en/custom/

Comment 4

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Can TT take wildcards in the search path?

Comment 5

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Can TT take wildcards in the search path?

  I have no idea, but even if it can't we can use glob to expand it.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

Marking this bug as depending on bug 289039, per my comment 1.

Comment 7

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

By the way, Bugzilla::Template already does look in the extensions directory for templates, as it turns out. (See the Bugzilla::Install::Util::get_template_include_path docs on the tip.)

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Bugzilla 3.2 is now frozen. Only enhancements blocking 3.2 or specifically approved for 3.2 may be checked in to the 3.2 branch. If you would like to nominate your enhancement for Bugzilla 3.2, set the "blocking3.2" flag to "?", and either the target milestone will be changed back, or the blocking3.2 flag will be granted, if we will accept this enhancement for Bugzilla 3.2.

Comment 9

[Frédéric Buclin]

We are going to branch for Bugzilla 4.4 next week and this bug is too invasive or too risky to be accepted for 4.4 at this point. The target milestone is set to 5.0 which is our next major release.

I ask the assignee to reassign the bug to the default assignee if you don't plan to work on this bug in the near future, to make it clearer which bugs should be fixed by someone else on time for 5.0.

Comment 10

[Simon Green]

This is something that I raised in the monthly Bugzilla meeting in June. It's definitely something that I want to see. brc take a lot of extensions from bmo (and a few from other places) so having a central repository would be a very good thing.

The two biggest issues that we need to overcome is handling updates and template hooks. An extension should be able to work without having to have hook's in the main template code if it all possible.