Cordova plugin versions and hot code push

A cordova app won’t be updated when the cordova-plugins file has changed. My question is how do you determine if a plugin has changed?
Do you compare the strings in the file cordova-plugins file or do you parse the package.json of the plugins?

To give an example:

cordova-plugin-facebook4@1.6.3

and

cordova-plugin-facebook4@https://github.com/jeduan/cordova-plugin-facebook4.git#687ceb681d4c1271f0be1237fe2b9900baca3825

points to the same version of the plugin. But for some reason the version 1.6.3 couldn’t be retrieve via npm anymore. So I need to change the plugin file. Now I’m wondering if the clients will be updated when I would push the new file to my production server.