As a plugin developer, I'd like to have stable, usable GreenHopper API

Guys, you've made incompatible changes to ranking API in 5.10.6 (in a patch version!) causing our plugin to lose connectivity with GreenHopper and some feedback from our customers – this made me write this story.

1. Stability

I would like GreenHopper API to follow the same rules JIRA API follows. Backward-incompatible changes would advance major API version; forward-incompatible changes would advance minor API version; implementation details change would advance micro version.

I would suggest that unlike JIRA, GreenHopper API have its own version number, independent from GreenHopper plugin version. This will allow you to advance API version in minor releases - but it will be an explicit, visible change (which hopefully you'd mention in the Release Notes).

2. Usability

Right now we have to extract GreenHopper classes and instances with reflection, because there's no compile-time artifact that we can depend on. The API should be a separate artifact that both GreenHopper main body and the outside plugin can depend on.

This artifact should have its own versioning (see above) and be published along with the sources for the API – before or at the same time GreenHopper version using that API version is released.

Thanks for listening!