Comment 6 for bug 591747

I use the tomboy-latex plugin. The version in the repos is out of date, so I run the latest version from the author. His install instructions recommend installing certain packages. What this example makes me realize, in the case of GTG, is:
 * If a plugin is going to be distributed by a package management system (e.g. in Ubuntu, via the repositories or a PPA), then the packaging can be used to satisfy the dependencies, OR
 * If a plugin is to be manually installed by the user, it is appropriate for the plugin author to provide some instructions ("Be sure to sudo apt-get install python-this python-that.")

Unless we can think of a third case, then this would allow getting rid of some parts of the GTG plugins code. GTG will still have to check that a plugin can be loaded, but it doesn't have to struggle to provide intelligible instructions to the user on which packages to install. Instead, plugin dependency failures can trigger either:
 * An apport bug submission with the relevant details (core plugins from gtg-plugins*) OR
 * A preformatted bug report to be sent to the plugin author (manually-installed plugins)

> gtg-plugins-extras
From the example of the texlive-* packages, it should be "extra" (not plural).