A faster release cycle for Zotero

dstillman Zotero Team
After today's release of Zotero 8, we'll be switching to much more frequent "major" releases, with the goal of getting stable features out to all users more quickly.

See our blog post for more details, and let us know if you have any questions.
  • tim820
    edited 4 hours ago
    Is there a process that Zotero can implement for users to determine plugin compatibility with major releases in a more systematic way ? So users can easily know before upgrading if any of their plugins will not work.

    A more frequent release cycle will make that a more regular issue faced by users.

    Ideally a user would be able to check plugin compatibility within Zotero before agreeing to a Zotero update. At its simplest could Zotero display in the plugin listing what each plugin specifies as its strict_max_version (in manifest.json) ?

    As it is, I just tried to check all of my 16 plugins by going to their github pages. Version compatibility is not supplied in any consistent way there, and sometimes not at all. After much searching, I was still uncertain of some of my plugins' version 8 compatibility.

    So I went to my Zotero profile directory, and then to the extensions folder there. I opened a 7-Zip console window, which showed me a list of all the XPI files (ie zip files). I opened each XPI in turn, showing all the files it contained, selected each XPI's manifest.json, then opened it in the external text editor. Then I could check the plugin's specified value for strict_max_version.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/profile_directory

    FWIW, of my plugins, the following are not currently v8-compatible:
    Zoplicate https://github.com/ChenglongMa/zoplicate/issues/176
    zotero-pdf-background
    DOI Manager https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-shortdoi/issues/56
    Zutilo https://github.com/wshanks/Zutilo/issues/285
    Also, zotero-attachment-scanner does not show an explicit '8' but simply shows 'strict_max_version: *'. EDIT: Seems like it mostly works: https://github.com/SciImage/zotero-attachment-scanner/issues/20#issuecomment-3789358415

    So I will probably be holding off on version 8 for a while.

    The Chinese plugin store/repository (ironically often the best source for plugin information) does theoretically allow you to filter its list for particular version compatibility. But it currently only shows 4 from all of its plugins as version 8 compatible (I know there are more).
    https://zotero-chinese.com/plugins/#zotero=zotero8

    Could version compatibility also be listed here in future (as well as ideally being a more up-to-date listing of still-supported plugins) ?:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins
    (as is, only one plugin mentions a version, and that is v6 !)
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited today at 12:56pm
    All OS-compatible version updates will be automatic going forward, and we won't be supporting older versions. Part of the point of rapid release is to try to ensure that everyone is on a recent version, not an old version that we can't fix problems for and that will break as soon as we make data-model changes (new fields and other long-awaited features), so providing more reasons for people not to upgrade is not the goal here.

    We know that strict_max_version is tricky with rapid release, and we'll have guidance for plugin developers soon on the dev list. But Zotero 8 has been in beta for a year, so if plugins haven't been marked as compatible, it's probably not a plugin people should be relying on.
  • sdflewrit783
    It is already hard to rely on plugins because they struggle to keep up. The last one we had and shall need to remove once we ensure all group library users actually stop its automatic functionality is DOI Manager. If you could consider folding its capabilities into Zotero, we'd be grateful. Otherwise, it is a general comment to alert you to the friction updates create on the plugin ecosystem and consider adding more features to Zotero directly, especially when they change the main database. E.g., the features for multilingual referencing would be good, such as translated titles, etc.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    I don't want to get too far afield discussing plugins here. Zotero 8 wasn't a rapid release and required more substantial plugin changes. Faster future releases will by definition be smaller.

    But I'll just say that the goal is to make it easier for plugins to stay up to date, not to integrate every useful plugin feature into Zotero.

    Z6 → Z7 was a massive architectural change — across 55 "major" Firefox versions, including a complete redesign of the extensions system and a modernization of the codebase — that required all plugins to be rewritten. Z7 → Z8 was a fairly big change as well, but it required much more straightforward changes. Future releases will involve many fewer changes at once for plugin developers — that's part of the benefit of rapid releases. We're also adding new APIs for common plugin integration points, and those should generally stay stable across many versions. So it should be relatively easy for plugins updated to Z8 to stay up to date going forward.

    Ultimately, though, plugin developers do need to maintain their plugins. There have been plugins that have caused major data-loss bugs or UI breakage after Zotero updates. New stable APIs will help avoid those things, and we may end up with two classes of plugins with different maintenance requirements. But regardless, we do need to know that developers both are testing with new versions and will respond quickly to any problems. If they can't commit to that, they shouldn't ask people to run their code. Given the vibrancy of the Zotero plugin ecosystem, it shouldn't be hard to find a better-maintained solution.
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