OpenRefine 3.1: compatibility with extensions

[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

Hi all,

This year we are carrying out various migrations in OpenRefine, to
renovate the foundations of the software. This will have various
benefits on the long term (such as easing onboarding of new developers,
simplifying extension maintenance and improving translations).

On the short term though, this means that most extensions will need a
bit more work to be updated for our upcoming 3.1 release.

The 3.1-beta version has already introduced an important change
(migration from Ant to Maven), the 3.1 final version will bring another
one (change of javascript localization library), and the next release
will change the JSON library in the server. Developers can learn more
about the required changes on their side on this wiki page:
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Migration-guide-for-extension-and-fork-maintainers

We hope that by introducing these changes gradually (one major migration
per version) we will make these migrations more palatable to the
community. However we do realize that these moves incur a significant
workload for maintainers. The rich ecosystem of extensions and forks is
a real asset for OpenRefine so we want to make sure we are not leaving
them behind.

If as a user there are extensions that you rely on which no longer work
with OpenRefine 3.1, please let us know on this mailing list so we can
coordinate their upgrading.

If as a maintainer you find yourself unable to find the time to migrate
an extension, feel free to request help on this mailing list and we will
do our best to assist.

Thanks,
Antonin