Bukkit

Versions

Links for specific CraftBukkit versions

• Check the Files tab for all HSP releases matched to Release (beta+) versions of Bukkit.
• For a recently released Minecraft/Bukkit build that has not yet been promoted to Beta, check the Jenkins link below.
• Development builds of this project can be acquired at the provided continuous integration server. These builds have not been approved by the BukkitDev staff. Use them at your own risk.
• Jenkins

Why so many versions?

The Bukkit team introduced a largely unpopular, intentional breaking change between CraftBukkit versions starting with dev build 2512 in the 1.4.5-R0.3 series. The change requires all plugins that build against CraftBukkit (the implementation) to recompile with every MineCraft release. This affects a lot of popular plugins such as WorldEdit, WorldGuard, DisguiseCraft, NoLagg, etc. And HSP is on the list as well.

I'm not going to debate the merits of the change here, that has been done exhaustively on the commit that made the change: http://goo.gl/bFH0W The summary is that the Bukkit team wants to protect you, the server admin, from plugins that might corrupt your server unknowingly in future releases. HSP is not one of those plugins, but is collateral damage of this change.

HSP's dependency on CraftBukkit is a result of it's dynamic command system, which was designed to put the power in your hands as a server admin; you have full control over what commands HSP uses, how it uses them and can even define your own custom commands. The Bukkit Command API offers none of these advanced features, so HSP has to work with CraftBukkit directly to provide them.

At some point, I will likely write an abstraction that allows HSP to be backwards compatible with all previous versions, so I will have one "current" version of HSP that will work with all known versions of CraftBukkit. (UPDATE: This is in place as of HSP 2.0) However, the Bukkit team will not approve plugins that try to guess future versions of CraftBukkit to be "future compatible" too, so as a result, you are stuck with HSP breaking every MC version update. CraftBukkit changes on the same MC version (ie. 1.5.1) aren't affected, but every time the MC version changes, CraftBukkit changes all of it's package imports. HSP's code is designed in such a way that this is only a 1-line code change, so that even if I am no longer able to maintain HSP, someone else will be able to easily update to future versions.

I also happily look forward to the day that the Bukkit Command API grows up and offers some more robust features so that I can drop the CraftBukkit requirement entirely use a Bukkit-only API.