SPIKE: Explore building multiple plugin versions from a single source

We are striving to provide compatibility across OpenShift versions for plugins, but we do control when shared dependencies like react, react-router, react-i18next, and patternfly make breaking changes. Additionally plugins want a way to use new APIs without breaking compatibility with older versions. We should explore how we can make this as easy as possible for plugins.

Let's investigate how to build multiple plugin versions from a single source. We can have webpack console remote plugin config to include or exclude certain files that are specific to console versions to generate different build targets. Then operators can have different versions of their plugin available at different paths under the same HTTP server.

We should consider allowing a single ConsolePlugin resource to reference multiple plugin services. This way an admin can enable the plugin once, but internally the operator can have different plugin version for different OpenShift console versions (for compatibility).

As a first pass, try a POC of this build/versioning system for test.

cc bflorkie@redhat.com vszocs@redhat.com jtalton christianvogt