Gradle 1.0 Plugin System

This proposal is a work in progress

What?

The plugin system refers to how you discover, use, author and share Gradle plugins.

There are a number of problems with the current plugin system:

There is no consistent way to discover existing plugins.
Plugin authoring is not well documented and more complex that it needs to be.
Plugins are not isolated from each other, so that their dependencies can collide.
There are many differences between using a built-in and an external plugin.
We cannot release a subset of Gradle.
more to come

Some use cases we want to solve or make easier to implement:

Build author discovers whether a plugin exists that solves a particular problem they have.
Build author uses a plugin which is not part of the Gradle distribution
Plugin author maintains a plugin to be shared by multiple builds in an organisation
Plugin author collaborates on an open source plugin with others
Build user installs and uses Gradle without downloading stuff that they do not need.
Gradle developer releases a new version of Gradle without also releasing new versions of all standard plugins.
Gradle developer releases a new version of a standard plugin without also releasing a new version of Gradle.
Gradle developer can provide different degrees of backwards-compatibility to different standard plugins. For example, for a Gradle 1.0 release we might want to provide backwards compatibility for the java, groovy, scala and war plugins, but not the announce and code-quality plugins.
more to come