claws-mail-extra-plugins for Debian
-----------------------------------

This is a collection of external plugins for Claws Mail. 
Plugins are dynamic libraries and as such they must share a common ABI 
with the host application to work properly. As the ABI is currently in 
development, the plugin code must check the Claws Mail version at 
load time so it matches the version the plugin was compiled with. Not 
doing so will result in unpredictable behaviour because of the ABI changes.

This represents no problem for internal plugins because they are
recompiled at the same time Claws Mail is, so version always matches.

OTOH, external plugins doesn't know when Claws Mail version has 
changed, so packages for external plugins have to be rebuilt with each 
new *upstream* version (Debian version changes shouldn't modify ABI).

On current packaging there is no way to express the dependency on upstream 
version only, so the implemented solution is to relax the dependency to 
greater or equal than the current upstream version and introducing a conflict
with the next upstream version, so the plugin can effectively live with any 
of the possible Debian revisions without needing to be rebuilt.

This solution has at least one problem: it depends on a future value of the
version string. If upstream versioning scheme changes the version range 
expressed by the current Depends/Conflicts pair may be wider than expected
and include the newer upstream version. In practice that means the old plugin
package won't be uninstalled when the new Claws Mail version gets 
installed. This has already happened with releases 0.9.12a and 0.9.12b.

To summarize, when loading a plugin if you see the popup message:
        "Your Claws Mail version is newer than the 
         version the plugin was built with"
then you have to wait until a new plugin package enters the archive.

Alternatively you may put claws-mail package on hold until all external 
plugins you use are uploaded and then upgrade both claws and the plugins 
at the same time.

 -- Ricardo Mones <mones@debian.org>  Mon, 26 Jun 2006 07:24:14 +0200
