[kiwidude]

I will have a situation very shortly where two plugins (Goodreads Metadata and Goodreads Covers) will reach "end of life" and be replaced by a single Goodreads plugin. Also at some point the Plugin Updater will get consumed into Calibre as per Kovid's suggestions above, and its life as an independent plugin will end. I also want to release the "Find Duplicates" plugin here for a short while for testing before it too goes into Calibre.

I imagine that down the track there could be other plugins either existing already or that others come up with which eventually become part of Calibre or are deprecated for various reasons.

At the moment, every plugin is listed on the plugin index page. This allows the plugin updater screen to act as a way of viewing and managing all the custom plugins you have installed. If I simply just remove a plugin from the index page, it would disappear from plugin updater screens. So a user might not be fully aware they still have it installed, that it has been deprecated etc.

One possible solution to this is to keep them on the index page, but move them to the bottom to a visually differentiated section (for forum users) and adding a ";Deprecated: Yes" pair to the informational section. Then plugin updater could highlight those plugins (perhaps with a red title), and maybe ensure they appear on the "Updates available" filtered view. The description text for the plugin could be used to describe the situation and what the replacement if any is etc.

Does that sound reasonable or do others have a better suggestion?

Also I am unsure if/how we handle the situation of a plugin such as Plugin Updater which the user has installed independently, then becoming a part of Calibre. Must it have a different name when in Calibre, will Calibre automatically remove/ignore the "separate" version somewhow, must we tell the user to uninstall it first etc etc. I am not sure if Kovid has ever had to deal with this situation before?