Sensible plugin version strings

[DaveBenham]

Currently all plugins within Cardinal show as version 2.0 within the Info context menu (at least that is all I have been able to find).

Is there really no way to put something more useful? It is really hard to tell what plugin features should be present.

For example, I would like to use the version number from the VCV json.plugin that was used as the code source.

This can help when looking at documentation. For example, the current Cardinal nightly build has Venom source from v2.14.2, but the latest release for VCV is v2.14.4. The Venom documentation is up to date at v2.14.4. As far as I can tell, there is no way for a user to tell what version is actually in Cardinal. If Cardinal listed the Venom version as v2.14.2, then the user could look at the Venom Changelog and see what features in the documentation are missing from v2.14.2,

[dromer]

I think part of the reason is that Rack does an ABI check based on the version.

Since Cardinal doesn't have the same limitations we force to the major version here: https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/blob/main/plugins/plugins.cpp#L1072-L1075
(we have some modules ported from v1.x that would be marked incompatible)

I do agree that it would be nice to see more directly which module versions are installed.

[dromer]

I came up with a solution, please review here: https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/pull/884/changes

[DaveBenham]

I think the major version must match, not be >= APP_VERSION_MAJOR. Also you assume the major version is a single digit, which need not be true.

To me the logic should be as follows:

if plugin version does not exist then use APP_VERSION_MAJOR + ".0"
else if plugin version major version == APP_VERSION_MAJOR then preserve current plugin version
else use APP_VERSION_MAJOR + "." + (plugin version with "_" replacing all ".")

Or simply use APP_VERSION_MAJOR + ".0" for the last else. But I prefer to have a meaningful plugin version

[DaveBenham]

I think the following code would implement the logic I have above

std::string pluginVersion = APP_VERSION_MAJOR + ".0";
auto versionJ = json_object_get(rootJ, "version");
if (versionJ != nullptr) {
  pluginVersion = json_string_value(versionJ);
  rack::string::Version ver = rack::string::Version(pluginVersion);
  if (ver.getMajor() != APP_VERSION_MAJOR.c_str()){
    std::replace(pluginVersion.begin(), pluginVersion.end(), '.', '_');
    pluginVersion = APP_VERSION_MAJOR+"."+pluginVersion;
  }
}
json_object_set_new(rootJ, "version", json_string(pluginVersion.c_str()));

[dromer]

It's not even clear if 3 (that they are working on now) will be foss.

If it takes 4-5 years between each major version then we might see 10 in 30+ years.
By then I'm sure Rack will also have a different method for checking this that we can copy ;)

[DaveBenham]

I'm referring to the version string in the plugin.json. Obviously the Rack major version will be 2 (for now)

[DaveBenham]

I installed the associated nightly, and I like this soooo much better - thanks!

[dromer]

No the plugin.json major has to be the same as Rack. It cannot get bigger unless it uses a different Rack API.

[dromer]

(btw this discussion should've probably been a feature request ticket. I'll close it. cheers!)