Bump GVPLUGIN_VERSION for major version bump?

Dev
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@magjac, in light of the next release involving a major version bump, do we need to bump the GVPLUGIN_VERSION? I wasn’t thinking about this when I reviewed the related MRs, but it occurred to me when re-reading GRAPHVIZ_PLUGIN_VERSION arithmetic (#1812) · Issues · graphviz / graphviz · GitLab. I think the answer is probably “no,” as the changes are backwards compatible wrt plugins. But we could equally well bump the plugin version to be conservative.

I think the plugin version is only relevant for out-of-tree plugins. Any plugins that live in the Graphviz repository could deal with a plugin version that was just the Graphviz release version and bumped with every single release. There’s no expectation that an in-tree plugin can be loaded by a different version of Graphviz.

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Wouldn’t bumping the GVPLUGIN_VERSION force a rebuild of 3rd party plugins? This seems unnecessary if there is no real need for it for any other reason.

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Do any 3rd party plugins even exist?

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Yes. I agree with your thinking not to increment it.

By the nature of the plugin system, we have no way of knowing. Anyone can write a Graphviz plugin without having to tell us about it or even open source the code.

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