Loader-Specific Dependencies

[sisby-folk]

Is your suggested enhancement related to a problem? Please describe.

We're now in an ecosystem with QSL, QKL, FFAPI, and various other loader-specific wrappers.

for a while i've marked our mods as "fabric" and "quilt" - without marking them as "depends on fabric API" as this is not really correct for quilt cases. At this point i'm now marking fabric versions of mods that are connector-compatible as "forge", again without any dependencies.

This is critical for visibility of the mods, but it's still confusing to end users who may not be on a frontend that leads well to reading the description:

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd like to see loader-specific dependencies personally. There are lots of cases where single-jar mods require X or Y library in a loader dependent way. Add a dependency, and then as an advanced option specify a loader on which it should only apply.

This would obviously be a new standard which consumers would have to implement (packwiz, prism, etc) but at least for me would solve the issue where our mods require QFAPI or FAPI or FFAPI - and we've manually confirmed that each of them work (rather than leaving it up to user guesswork)

Describe alternatives you've considered

For all i know, there's already some system in the works for more complicated dependencies that go beyond just "only applies for a specific loader" - That's fine too!

Additional context

No response

[Prospector]

I think a better idea to solve this same problem would be to allow separate versions to share a file. So you'd have the fabric and quilt versions as separate versions, but they could both link to the same file. This way, different deps and stuff can be applied. I think it would be far too confusing to have conditional dependencies.

This also does not need any new implementation for API consumers, just work on Modrinth's side.

[sisby-folk]

I'm not sure about that solution - tripling the amount of auto featured versions sounds like it would cause genuine UI problems.

Maybe a problem to solve first?