[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #5115: WordPress (plugin) updates compare unexpected values to find update matches

[WordPress Trac]

#5115: WordPress (plugin) updates compare unexpected values to find update matches
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 Reporter:  Quandary  |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  defect    |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  high      |    Milestone:  2.3.1    
Component:  General   |      Version:  2.3      
 Severity:  normal    |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:            |  
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Changes (by Quandary):

  * summary:  WordPress updates compare unexpected values to find update
              matches => WordPress (plugin) updates compare
              unexpected values to find update matches

Comment:

 I'm really fortunate, since all my plugins had the PHP metadata set to "In
 Series" with the space, not the dash. However, for folks that distributed
 versions that have ''different PHP metadata'', users will not get update
 notifications. This has the potential to put plugin maintainers in a jam,
 since there's no way (that I can see, anyhow) to get updates to show up
 for everyone.

 To alleviate this, some other mechanism will be needed to link a plugin to
 its place in the repository, in a backwards-compatible way. If we're going
 with plugin names, then there should be an (optional) file with a list of
 current-and-past names that a plugin has held. This way, plugin authors
 can change the name of their plugin (mostly for minor cases like my dash-
 to-space change) and not suffer an inability to upgrade users who have the
 plugin under a slightly different name. That said, there will need to be
 some mechanism in place to keep people from tromping on each other's
 plugins, accidentally or no. A little bit of oversight should be
 sufficient; since the repo's central, I figure it's easy enough to detect
 and boot out troublemakers.

 Also, I ran some stats against svn.wp-plugins.org to see how many plugins
 conform to the naming conventions. It makes a lot of assumptions
 (including that there have been no name changes ;), and doesn't take into
 account the popular vs. not popular plugins, nor current vs. abandoned/old
 plugins. If anyone can supplant the stats with that information, that
 would be useful; as they stand, they're simply a crude indicator of how
 many plugins won't work with the update feature. The script used to
 collect the first round of raw stats is included in the tarball. The rest
 of the stats were generated with the creative use of Vim and sed.

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5115#comment:4>
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