Let me start out by saying that this is
my personal opinion and
not reflective of
any team position on the matter (and it's very obviously not moderator text like Jaded's right above =)). I have a very strong opinion when it comes to forge&bukkit interactions, as anybody familiar with my pre-moderator post history knows.
The MCPC+ team has taken on a task of herculean proportions and has made the best of a very suboptimal situation. I happen to think, with the factors at play in that relationship, that the task in the long run is Sisyphean, though, and it's not their fault. In fact, most of the actors in this are being perfectly rational about it (opinion, but I'll substantiate it with observations and a salient link in a bit), and the problem isn't from the end of the MCPC+ folks, the mod devs, or the forge crew (more of my opinion).
From the end of the mod devs, to include MCPC+ compatibility as it stands requires compliance with not one, but two platforms. Some of them do it without complaint because it's easy for them or they have the time/understanding/tenacity/what have you. Other devs/dev teams have less time/patience/energy/know-how/whatever to try and fit into two boxes when they already are stuffing themselves into one. This isn't just FTB going "oh we don't want to pass along these reports", there are devs/dev teams that actively
will never touch anything involving MCPC+ because they don't want the extra work for reasons of their own which we have no business impugning. Modding is a hobby, not a job, and it isn't fair to demand them to do the extra work either, after all. The old way this was gotten around in the 1.2 era was by having separate bukkit-compatible versions maintained by third parties, but when 1.3 hit and server/client became unified (including on the mod side, where authors were quick to adopt universal distributions), the feasibility of maintaining that kind of framework dropped quite a bit. Yes, MCPC+ is quick to fix issues they can fix, but they also run into their fair share of things that do require the mod to change something, or where there is a dispute over who should change what.
Want an example? Do some searching around to see the arguments between the IC2 team and the MCPC+ team around IC2 builds 1.117-374 to 1.117-385, the versions included in latter iterations of FTB Unleashed in fact. The IC2 EnergyNet implementation has been dragged along up to date for a long time and was fraying at the edges as it was in those releases, but in conjunction with MCPC+ it was simply intolerable for servers to deal with. MCPC+ folks said it was an IC2 problem, IC2 team said it was an MCPC+ issue and that additionally they were kind of busy working on their 1.6 stuff. What does a third party like FTB do to "fix" that one and make everybody happy, pray tell?
Okay, so then, since this is all such a headache, why don't the Forge folks just get together and make it all work with bukkit so folks only have to make mods work with one platform? Well, I'm glad you asked.
This is the response they got when they tried just that. Now you know why I said
most of the actors are being perfectly rational (in my opinion). And then some people (in my opinion) decide they're too big to fail and that modded Minecraft is a second-class community unworthy of concessions/cooperation.
So, we have MCPC+ trying to bridge the gap between two
inimical APIs and doing a damn fine job of it given what they have. We have mod devs who, due to whatever factors cannot or will not -- and we have
zero right to gripe about this, guys -- try to write their code to fit in the space of conformity between the two platforms. And in the shorter term there's no magic key that's going to unlock the gates here to make it any easier, because any interoperability between forge and bukkit is going to be despite itself rather than by design, at least on one end.
You want solutions? Here's three to try on for size:
- Get more forge mods that do your must-need plugin things. For this you need to provide input on what you actually want to somebody who can actually do it, though. Bonus points for somebody brave enough to make the necessary pull requests to Forge so that it does have the right listening events or what have you (I believe Lex has been patiently waiting for a long time for people to show up with these, if I recall correctly).
- Sit on our hands and wait for Mojang's API to continue to coalesce and deeply hope it cuts the Gordian Knot on all of this. I have hopes, particularly since Mojang's recently hired Searge, but hope isn't really my kind of strategy.
- Find ways to make do with what we have, and work within the limitations. This means understanding that these conflicts will occur, there are no easy solutions, and it's going to be jury-rigged with ducttape and sweat. Which I think in part is what this thread is trying to accomplish if I am not mistaken, right?
TL;DR: This isn't about passing the buck, folks. It's about understanding what each of the players here does and does not have control over and dealing with it the best we all can. Let's work together to do just that.