Allow access to SCM::Plugin instance from deploy scripts - #2086

Hmm, I wonder if this should be :scm_plugins (plural) as an array? I believe the installer allows someone to install multiple SCM plugins. Or in any case, it doesn't prevent this from happening. If there were to be multiple SCM plugins installed, then a singular scm_plugin is misleading and establishes the wrong API contract.

In which case I think @scm_plugins should be initialized to an empty array, and then your code could be changed slightly:

@scm_plugins << plugin if provides_scm?(plugin)

What do you think?

Oh, I didn't realize that was possible.

Hrm. I did consider making this accessible for all plugins though. The reason why I didn't just do that was twofold:

• using an array can easily become confusing (even if we limit it to scm plugins) because you basically have to run #detect on it every time you want to access something
• the obvious solution to that would be something like a hash, there is no straight-forward mechanism (that I know of) to get a plugin's name.

Maybe the better solution in this case would be to add an optional as argument so you can do, for instance install_plugin Capistrano::SCM::Git, as: :git, and that will define a git method that returns the plugin?

Let me know what you think.

This does make me realize a way around all this though (though it's less elegant). Something like:

set :git, Capistrano::SCM::Git.new
install_plugin fetch(:git)

Hm. Looking at this some more I'm inclined to ask how common and supported a use case it is to use multiple repository types.

While this may in fact be possible, it seems like there hasn't been much effort elsewhere in the codebase to support it. For example, all repository types share the settings :repo_url and :branch. Also the configure_scm method and all of SCMResolver seems to only support a single SCM.

It seems that if using multiple SCMs is possible, it more than likely requires a fair bit monkey patching to work. This is particularly because the settings :repo_url and :branch are agnostic of the SCM used. While it's possible to run different scm services at the same URL (for instance, relying on the services having different default ports), it seems like it would be a pretty unusual setup.

And if support is shaky at best, I think it's reasonable to consider adding that support out of scope for this PR.