Make trac more robust against plugin failure

[anonymous]

I recently installed the ​AccountManager plugin from ​Trac Hacks. After the changes to the ITemplateProvider interface in [2132] this plugin makes trac stop working for obvious reasons. My question now is: would it be possible to make trac more robust against such plugin failures. So that if a plugin fails to initialize, trac would still work, but with the plugin disabled?

I made this ticket an enhancement request, because it is the devel version I am using after all.

[Christopher Lenz]

While I'll leave this open as an enhancement request, I don't think this is possible.

The plugin interfaces and the available plugins are basically experimental at this point, and breakage is unavoidable until we release 0.9 final. However, we should be using the versioning features provided by Setuptools in the future, so that plugins can declare what versions of Trac they are compatible with. Incompatible plugins will not be loaded.

Also, the evolution of the plugin APIs will be more conservative. If a change to an interface needs to be made, we'll consider making a new interface instead of just updating the existing one.

[sid]

Is this something that can be handled in 0.11?

[Christian Boos]

No, I don't think so, but it would be very useful to have this in the future.

[osimons]

Is there anything non-robust now as we have setuptools support integrated for 0.11? No plugin loading error for any reason will affect Trac as far as I know?

This should likely be set as 'fixed' for milestone 0.11?

[Christian Boos]

Starting with 0.11, plugins can easily declare which Trac versions they're compatible with, in their setup.py file, see for example r6573 (once 0.11 is out, this needs to be adapted to a plain >=0.11, I think).

See also: ​http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#declaring-dependencies