Plugin Updater: What happened to the changelogs?

[ownedbycats]

In the Plugin Updater, you used to be able to right-click on a plugin and see a popup with the changelog. Now it's missing. Was it removed? I found it useful.

[theducks]

Deemed High maintenance and needed Moderator action in many cases because the Thread owner is no longer active.
Many PI notes (and Logs) were very stale.

[JimmXinu]

You can still click 'Plugin Forum Thread' for a plugin and then look at the version logs there--that's where they came from, after all.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

Deemed High maintenance and needed Moderator action in many cases because the Thread owner is no longer active.
Many PI notes (and Logs) were very stale.

More than that even. Most PI Developers are not Moderators so the PI Index needed Moderator action even if a PI Developer was active. And PI developers very rarely made requests for updates to the index - I have had two such requests over the years I've been a moderator.

The Updater gets most of what it needs from the PI source code not the Index; hence, there was very little incentive to keep the MR index up to date, consequently it was a source of misinformation - particularly with respect the version numbers.

Curious, what did the Version History context menu option actually do?

You can get to the PI thread from the updater and scroll down to Version History.

BR

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Curious, what did the Version History context menu option actually do?

It wasn't available all the time, but when it was it just showed the changelog in a small popup window. It was helpful to know what exactly had changed without opening the browser.

[JimmXinu]

I used to request updates to the plugin index years ago, but it was also fragile; innocuous changes to formatting could prevent scraping and every time it was changed was another chance to break it. It was safer and basically no less effective to leave it out of date. I'm happy it's changed.

Version History used to be scraped and displayable directly from inside Calibre. It saved a couple clicks and some scrolling at most.

[ownedbycats]

Having it randomly break sounds....annoying. I understand the removal.

[DiapDealer]

I used to request changes to the PI index all the time. Right up until I was told it was no longer necessary to do so. That was years ago.

[BetterRed]

I have an abhorrence of maintaining the same thing in two places. I'm sure Djikstra, Hoare and the other guy had term for it. Page for page, their little black book and K&R's slim white one had more influence on IT than a dozen of the many 500 page tomes published since.

BR

[thiago.eec]

Well, the version history was fetched from the plugin thread, so it had nothing to do with the Index, except maybe for the "History: Yes" part.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by thiago.eec

Well, the version history was fetched from the plugin thread, so it had nothing to do with the Index, except maybe for the "History: Yes" part.

And as I pointed out earlier: That has to be maintained as well.
The Thread CREATOR could edit their own posts. Maintainers, can not. Thus putting the burden on the Mods..

BTW The Zip file sometimes contains release notes (Not always kept current by the maintainer, some of which is only doing PY level compatibility to keep the PI usable)