[forge-dev] plugin versioning

[Paul Bakker]

Hi all,

Yesterday during the meeting we talked about plugin versioning. Currently Forge checks if there is a tag/branch of the plugin that matches the Forge API version while installing. We discussed if we can test on compatibility of plugins on a CI server. 

I started thinking about this again and actually think we should re-think the version checking mechanism. Now that Forge is final, the APIs should be stable. They should be stable until we go for a 2.0.0 version, which means plugins are not supposed to break on API changes for 1.0.1, 1.1.0 etc. If we do that correctly, it's also not necessary to upgrade plugins each time there is a new release (or be back at building to snapshots which is dangerous). Instead I suggest prompting available versions of plugins during plugin installation (still looking at tags for that), so that a user can choose to use a stable version, some beta or maybe a snapshot.  This also gives us the freedom to do minor Forge releases more often without the hazzle of upgrading all plugins once again…

Thoughts?

Paul