Understood. I’m a big fan of Gradle, and you guys are doing great work! I think the idea of the plugin portal is fantastic, and you guys did a great job with what seems to me like the hard part - API keys, delivering the plugins, a nice search feature for discovering new plugins, etc.
Supporting snapshot versions seems easy compared to this, and the whole idea of the portal and the new plugin syntax is tanked if we can’t publish snapshots. If we can’t publish snapshot versions, then we can’t actually use plugins.gradle.org for development - we have to stage them somewhere else while we’re doing testing. If we have to stage somewhere else, then anyone who wants to help test cutting edge versions can’t use the nice
plugins {
id "com.some.plugin" version "0.4.1-SNAPSHOT"
}
syntax, which really undercuts adoption of the portal and the syntax. It also makes it much harder to get people to test new versions of our plugins - if they have to add some one-off URL to their maven repo lookup, it’s a much higher bar than just bumping their version number.
There are other seemingly simple bugs in the portal which have gone a long time without fixing. I know you guys have a full plate, but every day this goes unfixed is another day that active plugin developers have to use the old syntax and third-party repository hosting options in order to contribute to the plugin ecosystem.