plugin was built with a different version of package github.com/hashicorp/consul/api about aes-example-plugins

[LukeShu]

Ugg, this is because of some weirdness with how Consul split their go.mod file; it's confusing the version check in the Makefile in to thinking everything's OK when it's not. This is already fixed on AES's master branch (by virtue of upgrading the Consul libraries) and will be fixed in 1.13.0; but we should fix the examples for 1.12, certainly.

The example plugins that don't use github.com/hashicorp/consul/* should all work fine.

Is it possible to get a complete dependency graph of AES 1.12.2 for it seems quite impossible to successfully/correctly build any kind of non-trivial plugin?

Yes, so that's what it's doing when the Makefile runs:

docker run --rm --entrypoint=cat docker.io/datawire/aes:1.12.2 /ambassador/aes-abi.txt > aes-abi.txt

aes-abi.txt is the definitive listing of what went in to the actual AES executable. Alternatively, if you don't want to trust that, you can run go version -m /path/to/file on the /usr/local/bin/amb-sidecar file from the AES image (go is not installed in the image; you can apk add go, or extract the file from the image).

[kriptor]

@LukeShu thanks for the explanation, I appreciate it.