Hey all
We've been researching ways to prevent cordova workflow breakages, caused by
installing edge versions of the plugins, which possibly could be incompatible
with cordova version, used by user. This is IMO a very nasty sort of problems,
because it might cause unpredictable build- and runtime failures of cordova
setup which has been working perfectly previously.
A typical example of this scenario is when some plugin introduces a change
incompatible w/ some particular cordova version and doesn't update
'cordovaDependencies' property in its' package.json correspondingly.
To prevent such breakages and avoid negative user experience I propose to start
using `cordovaDependencies` in our core plugins in a following way:
1. For every plugin we maintain, we add `cordovaDependencies` to its'
package.json w/ the following entry
CURRENT_PLUGIN_VERSION: { cordova: >= LATEST_SUPPORTED_CORDOVA_VERSION }
We will try to determine the LATEST_SUPPORTED_CORDOVA_VERSION based on release
notes and most significant changes in plugins, but probably we can safely use
6.1.0 here because new version choosing logic for `plugin add` was introduced
in this version and older versions of cordova will not use
`cordovaDependencies` anyway.
Also for some plugins adding such entry doesn't make sense because they will
work with any version of cordova, so for these plugins this step could be
omitted.
2. For every plugin we add additional 'protective' entry
NEXT_MAJOR_PLUGIN_VERSION: { cordova: >= 100 }
There are 2 purposes for this:
- if there is a major plugin update that potentially would broke
compatibility with some cordova versions, this will protect users against
installing this major update, unless plugin maintainers update
`cordovaDependencies` by adding corresponding entry for this plugin version.
In other words, if we've introduced a breaking change and forgot to update
`cordovaDependencies` correspondingly to reflect that the change requires a
specific cordova version, user will not get this plugin update.
- By some reason without such 'protective' entry in case if
NEXT_MAJOR_PLUGIN_VERSION gets released without adding corresponding entry to
`cordovaDependencies` (i.e. we don't have any restrictions for this version in
`cordovaDependencies`) - cordova will fetch that version without any checks.
This is sounds non-obviously for me and probably there is some reason behind
installing plugin version, which we can't verify requirements for, but this is
how it works.
3. When we introduce a change that requires us to change plugin version to
`NEXT_MAJOR_PLUGIN_VERSION`, we go and fix `cordovaDependencies` by changing
cordova requirement for `NEXT_MAJOR_PLUGIN_VERSION` to actual value instead of
100 and introducing `ANOTHER_NEXT_MAJOR_PLUGIN_VERSION: { cordova: >= 100 }`
entry.
I would love to hear any feedback about this proposal or any other ideas that
might help us to prevent such breakages w/ cordova and plugins.
-
Best regards, Vladimir
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