(Extensions) Enhance Extension versioning to indicate compatibility.
The existing model is to have exactly one version of a given extension on inform7.com. This means that, when an extension is updated to work with a newer version of I7, the older version is no longer available.
Similar to the way I7's download page (http://inform7.com/download/) shows all previous releases, perhaps it would be useful to include downloads for previous releases of extensions. Adding extension syntax (e.g. "Tested with 5T18 and 5U92") would make scripting this relatively easy.
Mark J Musante
shared this idea
Related work is under way with the volunteer overhaul of extension management.
2 comments
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AdminAaronReed
(Admin, Inform 7)
commented
One concern: it would be hard to keep the versioning line accurate. While new Inform releases often break extensions, they more often don't, and many authors update old extensions infrequently or not at all. This might lead to a perception down the line that few extensions are compatible with a then-current I7 release, when in fact most of them would still work as expected.
Similarly, most authors (I would hazard to guess even most extension authors) do not keep a large number of prior versions of Inform installed on their machine. Testing with prior versions might seem like a headache, resulting in only the current version ending up listed-- which could also imply incorrectly that extensions won't function with earlier versions that could in fact handle them.
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AdminAaronReed
(Admin, Inform 7)
commented
This suggestion has a bit of an overlap with an existing suggestion to archive old versions of extensions (http://inform7.uservoice.com/forums/57320-general/suggestions/751972-website-extensions-archive-old-version-of-extens?ref=title). To clarify from correspondance with Mark, the unique bit here is to add a new Inform syntax for extension authors that allow them to specify which versions of Inform an extension has been verified compatible with.
