When using the Manage Plugins page from the Manage Hudson console, an issue exists where you can pass the connectivity check OK (making sure you have the IP mapped in /etc/hosts to the plugin location) - but then the plug-in you've either selected for update or new install just sits in Pending status. Just below the connection Success message...One gets the grey ball icon w/ the plugin name and it just sits in "Pending" status....and never goes any further. There is the button to click and restart Hudson once it is done...but the grey ball icon never goes green (I use the green ball plugin btw, so normally it goes green when ready).

This happens whether updating existing or adding new plugins. Consequently, I have had to go to the manual process, copying the *.hpi files into the /plugins folder under the HUDSON_HOME and doing start/stop of Hudson from the Tomcat Manager console.

According to the users@hudson.dev.java.net mailing list, this is a known issue as taken from the response today from another user:

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Jesse Farinacci <jieryn@gmail.com>
reply-to users@hudson.dev.java.net
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date Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:42 AM
subject Re: Plug-ins question - plug-in install/update stuck in "Pending" ?
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hide details 10:42 AM (11 hours ago)

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Mark Streit <mcs130@gmail.com> wrote:
> So this is a known issue then with Hudson? If so, has this been reported as
> a problem yet? Interesting that you say this because it seems when the
> plug-in location changed to http://jenkins-ci.org ( I had to add a new entry
> in /etc/hosts ) .... it started to show up. The connectivity checks all
> come back "Success". The plug-in ball icon just sits Grey and in a pending
> state forever.
>

Yep, this is exactly what I see happening. The network connectivity
check returns success (perhaps this is the actual bug) but the
download of the plugin doesn't actually ever seem to complete. I can't
say 'forever' because I usually give up watching it after about 5 or
10 minutes. I can directly fetch the plugins with curl, from the
Hudson server instance, logged in as the user that Hudson runs under,
so I don't think there's actually a real connectivity problem. Perhaps
Hudson is doing some sort of slick underhanded UDP, or custom
protocol, thing to fetch plugins which is being blocked by our
corporate infrastructure?

It's not really something I care about as I already have scripts which
invoke Maven to deploy the file via scp to where Hudson can see it. I
find this works best for our environment as I can run my own tests
beforehand inside the Hudson project itself.

Anyway, feel free to report it, I will happily subscribe to it.