There’s been numerous issues over the past few releases where third party plugins reference internal API’s and the internal API’s change in some incompatible way. Can I suggest that an extra step is added to the plugin portal publish mechanism to interrogate the plugin and determine any internal API usage? If this were stored in some form of plugin meta-data we could add some interesting features:
- Notify plugin authors of upcoming breaking changes to the internal API
- List internal API references on the plugin portal to give consumers an idea of how fragile the plugin may be
- If an internal API has many references, perhaps it should be public