[Qgis-developer] The new Plugin Manager in master and plugins for 1.8 and 2.0

[Borys Jurgiel]

This mail is only related to the nightly builds and developer master branch. 
If you use the stable QGIS 1.8, you can ignore it.

Hi Devs and developer branch Users,

From yesterday the master branch uses plugin API 2.0, so old plugins for QGIS 
1.x don't work anymore. We (their authors) need some time to update them to 
the new API. Because formally the current developer version is still 1.9, I 
just hardcoded 2.0.0 as the current version number in the plugin managing stuff 
until it's officially switched. For that reason QGIS only accepts plugins 
compatible with version 2.0 now!

Don't be surprised the plugin manager has become blind and shows empty 
repositories. It just properly recognizes all the the old 1.8 plugins as 
incompatible and doesn't display them. As the plugins will be updated to the 
2.0 API, they should start to appear in the Manager again.


For plugin authors:

Because QGIS assumes plugin is only compatible with one major version, so you 
need to set qgisMinimumVersion to 2.0 in order to make it compatible with QGIS 
2.0.0 - 2.999.999. If you set qgisMinimumVersion to 1.x, it will assume that 
MAXIMUM version is 1.999.999.

In case you want to create a plugin compatible with both API, you need to 
explicitly set both qgisMinimumVersion and qgisMaximumVersion tags. However, 
it's only reasonable for very simple plugins, because the changes are maybe 
not numerous, but quite fundamental.