Uniform links to latest version

As the owner of a Garry's Mod community with several servers I realized something really annoying about Bukkit, and Minecraft in general.
Every (bukkit) server owner knows this problem, Minecraft was updated.
Okay, so with this new Minecraft and Bukkit update, some Bukkit functions have been deprecated or removed. This renders the server completely inoperable in a newer version and you're forced to either downgrade the server again, or update all of your plugins, ranging from just a few to 50, maybe 100 different plugins.
Obviously you would want to keep Bukkit as updated as possible, so you decide to download plugin updates. What I usually do here, is to enter the plugins folder and run the "ls *.jar" command (as I run Linux) to get a list of all the JAR files I need to update. Now I have to open a page for each of those, and since the BukkitDev search function is really crappy and lists threads about issues with a plugin before the actual plugin, even when you hit the page title spot-on, I use plugins.bukkit.org to find the plugin, open the forum thread, click the BukkitDev link. From here I need to figure out wether the new compatible release is either stored in the developers build management solution, such as Jenkins, or in the Files tab in BukkitDev. Then I click in there and copy the link, wget it to my server, and that's one plugin. Now I just need to repeat this 35 times to update the rest of my plugins.

This is an extremely time-consuming and tiresome task, that could be avoided with a few requirements to the developers. These do not need to be of any annoyance to them, in fact it shouldn't even affect them.

As a developer you have the opportunity to upload files and set them to different release types, such as Release or Beta or whatever other options you have. Why not lay out the files system like on dl.bukkit.org?
The developers can upload the file and set it as either Dev, Beta or Stable. The latest file of each branch would always be on a specific URL so the server owners can create a simple script to automate updates. Something as simple as this:

Code:

wget http://dev.bukkit.org/MyPlugin/stable/MyPlugin.jar
wget http://dev.bukkit.org/SomePlugin/dev/SomePlugin.jar
wget ...

Really, this would save so much time.

I compare this to Garry's Mod because most Garry's Mod addons were available in subversion repositories (Because the addons were just lua and didn't have to be compiled). All you had to do was using SVN Export.

To reduce the amount of extra work to the developers, it should be possible to bridge the latest artifacts and builds from Jenkins. For instance using a redirect.

I know this is a lot of work to do, but I feel that BukkitDev is extremely ineffective to me, and possibly many others.

 

You should never download a file without reading its changelog first...

 

Haven't caused me trouble the past 6 years?
I run tests on a local server before applying changes to anything public.

A script with a revert function would be pretty easy to create anyway, just move the current jars to a backup folder or rename them to .bak.

 

BukGet used to provide this. Not sure what happened to it.

 

We never left.

adding on those links should be relatively easy. We are already tracking that information in bukget, just never provided a link. I should be able to add the ability to override the like i have with "latest" feel free to take a look at the Plugin Details information: http://bukget.org/pages/docs/API3.html


UPDATE: After spending a few minutes with the API, I was able to add in this ability. Docs have also been updated to account for this new feature as well.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

http://api.bukget.org/api/plugin/mctag/latest/download

 

hawkfalcon ??

May I also mention that the extra slugs were added to API3, so you may want to look there. API1 is there simply to not break old code at this point.

http://bukget.org/pages/docs/API3.html

 

But if I'm just looking for a static link, that seems to be the simplest way.

 

Well check these out:

http://api.bukget.org/3/plugins/bukkit/mctag/release
http://api.bukget.org/3/plugins/bukkit/mctag/beta
http://api.bukget.org/3/plugins/bukkit/mctag/latest

And you can add /download to that for the 302 link to the file.

 

Oh, that's cool
Now I just need figure out which plugins I want updated how, because some of my plugins are pulled from last successful build in Jenkins. I know I probably shouldn't do that, but the server isn't ready yet anyway.

 

Yeah the API is updated exclusively by BukkitDev.