Pulp

misa brought this up in a recent conversation, which was a desire for a plugin to be able to declare that it does not work unless the platform plugin API version is greater or less than a given version.

Functionally speaking, I think this means that a plugin should to be able declare a minimum-supported platform plugin API version and a maximum-supported plugin API version.

Comparator support could also be useful, so that for the minimum supported version a plugin developer could specify that the platform version must be "greater than" or "greater than or equal" to the platform plugin API version and for the maximum supported version a plugin develop could specify "less than" or "less than or equal to" a given platform plugin API version. Optionally, a simpler approach would be to declare that the minimum supported version evaluated by platform will always be evaluated as "greater than or equal" and the maximum supported version will always be evaluated as "less than".

So, for example, we introduce a new feature in 3.2 that results in a corresponding y-version bump of the plugin API version. Any plugin that requires that new feature to run should be able to report the minimum plugin API version required for that plugin to function.

Another example is if we alter a feature in 4.0, so that a plugin depending on that feature no longer works with 4.0. That plugin should be able to indicate that its maximum plugin API version is any version less than the corresponding platform plugin API version.

At the moment, I believe that the plugin API will be versioned separately from the platform code versioning. If we decide not to do that, then any mention of plugin API versioning should be changed to refer directly to the platform version.

This story is not concerned with what platform does, when loading plugins, if a plugin reports that it is incompatible with the Pulp platform that is loading it. We can file that story if this one is accepted, since there's minimal value in filing such a story if we don't first supply an interface for plugins to declare their compatibility.