The use of bundled plugins in today's Jenkins is not well documented. In trying to find information about their usage, via the developers' email list, it was suggested my best bet might be to ignore bundled plugins alltogether.

The question I have is whether Jenkins today installs all bundled plugins at startup time. And that could be at initial startup (the very first time after an install) or at every time the war starts running.

The impact relates to when the plugin installation manager cli tool (or the install plugins shell script) run. The next paragraph is next to impossible to understand because its so circular.

If update manger cli (or script) runs after bundled plugins have been installed automatically, it will take into account the plugins that are installed and the bundled ones are irrelevant. Then plugins might get put back when bundled ones get installed on the next startup. If iupdate manager cli (or script) runs before bundled plugins are installed, and they really are being installed, then the plugins installed by the update manager (or script) will get replaced when the bundled ones get installed.

Proposal

It's not clear to me that there is any solution to choosing versions for this circular sort of situation. So what I propose is to allow the user to have the plugin manager cli consider bundled plugins by default or, optionally by command line option, ignore bundled plugins completely.

Ignoring means not collecting the list of bundled plugins. They will not be considered when determining which plugins to download. They will not be considered when determining which version of a plugin to download.