In reply to Justin Tadlock.

It's ultimately about trust for the user. The best way to do that is to make sure developers have easy-to-use tools.

It sounds like the WP repo needs some sort of system to help developers. I'm no person to update it but say after a couple weeks or so on the heels of a new WP release, an e-mail goes out that says something like:

"As the author of xxx plugin, can you confirm compatibility with WP x.x?" with maybe 3 options:

* No known issues with x.x
* Broken, last known version that worked was.... [dropdown with wp versions]".
* Haven't tested but we don't expect any major functional or rendering issues".

Well crafted, simple plugins could easily choose the first option. You click confirm in the e-mail and it gets updated, so no changing readme files, etc. It'd be like validating whether an e-mail is valid with an account, child's play.

Maybe the system could detect that simple, 1 file plugins could opt out of this as well. And maybe point releases of WP could automatically get updated too or run some kind of automatic linting against the latest version.