feat(plugins): provide additional build info to plugins

[cardoso]

I'm building a plugin that manages spin versions. It would be useful to understand where the build comes from, so it can be upgraded/downgraded/recovered safely.

I had to update vergen to version 8 and did some cleaning up on the way.

The additional info is sent to the plugin child process envs:

SPIN_BIN_PATH=/Users/cardoso/.cargo/bin/spin
SPIN_BRANCH=feat/more_build_info
SPIN_BUILD_DATE=2023-05-15
SPIN_COMMIT_DATE=2023-05-15
SPIN_COMMIT_SHA=49fb11b
SPIN_DEBUG=false
SPIN_TARGET_TRIPLE=aarch64-apple-darwin
SPIN_VERSION=1.2.0-pre0
SPIN_VERSION_MAJOR=1
SPIN_VERSION_MINOR=2
SPIN_VERSION_PRE=pre0

[itowlson]

This looks great (and I'm excited to see your plugin - sounds super useful). My only reservation is the change to the existing behaviour of spin --version. Our docs and learning materials do currently guide people to --version and I'm wary of confronting new users with this much detail.

My vote on this would be to (as you mention) follow Cargo and have -V/--version show the short form and -V -v show the long form. But other folks may be less change-averse - happy to wait for others to weigh in.

And thanks again - I apologise for getting hung up on what may seem like a niggle - the content of the PR looks great.

[itowlson]

• @michelleN for thoughts on the UI question

[cardoso]

@itowlson I opted to reduce the scope here to just sending the env vars to the plugin and make a separate PR for the CLI eventually

[itowlson]

This looks great! 100% agree on reducing scope: as you say, this unblocks the plugin scenario, and we can always iterate on the UI. Thanks!

[kate-goldenring]

@cardoso this is great providing plugins with more information about Spin. I created an issue to also update developer docs to call out what env vars are passed to plugins fermyon/developer#632.

[karthik2804]

This is great! Thanks!

[itowlson]

@cardoso This just missed the cutoff for Spin 1.2, so for now you will need to use canary or HEAD for your plugin development. I can't commit on when the next release will be; we are tracking a roughly monthly schedule at the moment, but absolutely no promises!

[cardoso]

No problem @itowlson . I still need to submit more PRs to have enough features for the plugin to be solid. Hopefully 1.3 will suffice.