Many softwares and video games, from my experience, that are capable of being modded/ support plugins, tend to break with each update and require constant maintenance from their devs.
However, and correct me if im wrong - i dont think that’s the case with krita and its plugins? It can cause bugs yes, but most of them work just fine.
Is that something that Krita’s team pays attention to? Or am i just very lucky lol
This is probably more of a coincidence because the API changing very little but I have seen it happen a few times. I have seen plug-ins fail so hard that the whole interface of Krita gets unusable. In best cases the plug-in fails silently at a point where it just simply doesn’t work but it can also happen that implementations change and functions suddenly return different values which can lead to hilarious (or dangerous) miscalculations. I don’t know if the devs are extra careful about not braking plug-in compatibility but I don’t think so (since I have seen things break a lot after some updates). Just with the other programs it is the plugin creator’s responsibility to ensure that things still work with a new version. I rarely see krita plug-ins having an auto update fuction or being actively maintained by their creators after release (unfortunately).
That’s an interesting question.
I would say that it mostly depends on what the plugin does and how it does it. Also - who wrote the plugin and whether they care to support it long term.
Krita does officially support python plugins and expose API for them to use. This is a very limited sandbox that allows doing only the most basic things. Krita developers rarely make any changes to this API - only sometimes volunteers add small new features - but at least existing functions are not removed or modified. Simple plugins ( like those that only combine existing actions into new ones) should not break at all, as nothing really changes here.
On the other hand, it is possible to access data outside of the official API. If a plugin modifies existing krita interface or interacts with internal events - this can break with every krita release. For example my old plugin Subwindow Organizer broke so heavily when krita made some changes to window events, that I never managed to bring it back to life. Now with Shortcut Composer I’m much more careful not to add functionalities that could be broken this way.
The last thing is whether the developer feels responsible for their plugin. Some create it then forget about it the moment after. Some seem to update the plugin each time it breaks. Krita being open-source helps here, as you can check out beta versions, and fix things before the new version officially releases.
So I guess you were lucky only to use well-written plugins from people who care about them, as there should be a ton of plugins here that no longer work.
I don’t intend to be harsh or snarky, but the real reason is Krita gets major updates very infrequently (5.2 → 5.3 is two years!)
Rest assured, when you upgrade to Krita 6, plugins will be broken.