#494 added new undocumented required EX- plugin prefix

[valentine195]

Hello!

My team found today that #494 added a new prefix requirement for external plugins. While the example external plugins do have this prefix, there doesn't appear to be any documentation showing this prefix as a requirement. Is this intended for going forward? We created all of our tooling around a different, custom prefix 😄

Thanks.

edit: specifically, this was the change: https://github.com/apigee/apigeelint/pull/494/files#diff-a637ad58de019d2c54d81639ea3d761a116f33422d158ccf82d3e17340af0da3R63

[DinoChiesa]

While the example external plugins do have this prefix, there doesn't appear to be any documentation showing this prefix as a requirement. Is this intended for going forward?

Hmmm... You're right. I hadn't thought people would need to use a different prefix. I'll have to look at it.

Your view is valid that if this is the restriction, we should have documented it. At this point I'm not sure we need to have this restriction going forward.

The idea behind having a fixed prefix for external plugins was to distinguish between "external" and "bundled" plugins. But that may be an artificial requirement. We might be able to relax that requirement.

There's one catch I can think of (without having tested this): Requiring ALL external plugins to have a name like EX000 implicitly avoids name clashes. I am not sure if there would be any problem if there was an external plugin with the same name as a bundled plugin. I'll have to test it.