[RCD] Upcoming changes in Roundcube's plugin repository

[Thomas Bruederli]

Roundcube’s plugin repository is built around Composer which is used to
install plugins and their dependencies. For many years we’ve been running
our own plugin repository from a fork [1] of the most popular packagist.org
service. Over time source code repositories like Github, Gitlab or
Bitbucket as well as the Packagist codebase changed significantly which
made it hard for us to maintain our fork. We therefore decided to give it
up in favor of the well maintained packagist.org service.

The plan is to move all Roundcube plugins currently registered at
plugins.roundcube.net to packagist.org. They’re already Composer packages
of type roundcube-plugin and thus don’t need any changes in their code or
structure. The plugins.roundcube.net service remains active as a Composer
repository but will be changed to read-only mode.

So what does this mean for you?

* For Roundcube users

For the consumer side using Composer to pull Roundcube plugins and updates
to them, nothing changes. You don’t even need to change your composer.json
file as all currently registered plugins will still be listed at
plugins.roundcube.net while updates will be pulled from packagist.org which
is the default repository for Composer anyway.

* For plugin developers

Unfortunately there’s no way for us to feed all Roundcube plugins
registered in our repository to packagist.org. Therefore, as a plugin
developer you’re required to sign up at packagist.org [2] and then register
your plugin(s) there. It’s as simple as it was on plugins.roundcube.net and
only takes you a minute or two. We strongly encourage you to do so even if
you’re not currently pushing new releases to your plugin.

* Roadmap

We’d like to make the switch on May 17th 2020. On this day, the repository
data of plugins.roundcube.net will be frozen and the current Packagist
service will be replaced by a read-only clone that’ll keep on serving
requests from Composer to install Roundcube plugins. After that day, all
updates and new registrations for Roundcube plugins need to be submitted to
packagist.org. Once a plugin is listed at packagist.org, Roundcube’s plugin
repository will no longer list it in order to make packagist.org the only
source.

We’d like to thank all plugin developers for their efforts and
contributions. Only with the rich variety of plugins, Roundcube webmail
became the powerful open source software product it is today.

Kind regards,
Thomas & Alec

[1] https://roundcube.net/news/2016/08/05/plugin-repository-pimped-up
[2] https://packagist.org/login/
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