Management of plugin upgrades #7
Description
Based on my experience with the GUI of plugin manager, for the version it shows the currently installed version (or version that was fetched during the last upgrade) and for status it displays whether the plugin is installed or available for installation.
For the upgrading process itself, there is no option to upgrade plugins selectively. By right-clicking in the plugin manager, the context menu shows an option “Upgrade All”. Command search provided two options: “Upgrade” and “Upgrade All”. By selecting “Upgrade” all plugins were upgraded, which was a bit unexpected.
Coming from other IDEs, am used to updating plugins selectively after seeing that update is available. One of the ways it could be done can be described as follows…
Actions available to the user:
· New global (inside plugin manager) context option “Fetch Updates”, which will fetch only the information about new versions or plugins. This also could be added to the command list.
· New per-plugin context option “Upgrade”, which will upgrade only the selected plugin.
· Considering the amount of plugins available, potentially useful would be a new context option “Upgrade Selected”, which will upgrade only the selected plugins (there is no selection of multiple plugins right now).
Providing information to the user:
· After “Fetch Updates” action, display that a new version number is available for upgrading the plugin. Instead of adding a new column, it could be shown in the “Version” column as in the example: 0.2.3 → 0.2.4 (granted that plugin manager does not wrap lines, otherwise it could be shown on the next line).
· For a plugin with available upgrade show word “upgradable” in the “Status” column, which also allows user to group upgradable plugins when sorting the list by this column.
Another present issue is a changelog for plugins, which, as I understand, does not exist right now, but that probably requires a different issue for discussion.