[Bf-committers] Some ideas to improve the "Add-Ons" section

[mindrones]

Hi!

On 05/21/2011 12:31 AM, Doug Hammond wrote:
>>
>> - Ability to keep addons in sync/update with an online repo could work
>> but am wary of this turning into a package manager, we would need to
>> have a branch for each release so addon devs could work on extension
>> trunk as well as the release branch so users get updates too.
>> Since this needs buy-in from existing addon developers I rather leave
>> this for a bit since addons are being actively added/written/removed
>> and the addon community is still quite new.
> 
> 
> I though work in this direction was already under way, I remember discussing
> at length
> with mindrones about addon metadata, development branches, stable branches,
> binary module URLs etc etc...
> 
> What happened to all that effort?


It's a bit on hold due to my work on the wiki maintenance and real life
small disasters (like having to relocate twice :)


Some times ago, when we've setup the new wiki server we have also setup
a virtual host for the addon dispatcher application that will distribute
updates for trunk/contrib, but also for externals addons, like
luxrender, yafaray, gamekit, etc...


As Doug said, the design is already setup, see
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mindrones/Bf-extensions/External_addons

All in all we have dsicussed at length, so we know well what to do, it's
a matter of doing it. Sorry to be late on that :/


As Campbell said, we will need to work on branches, so that if a
developer has updates for a blender version that has already been
released he will have to commit in branches, here:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-extensions/branches/

If you download a certain version of blender and a developer makes a fix
on branch for your revision, you would get notified and download the new
version. But it's not that easy because some people develop scripts in
the scripts/ dir, so just overwriting the current script with a new one
might be undesirable for some people. We need to think about a temp/dev
folder to store stuff when we update.


About external scripts, there has been a long discussion with Ton in
#blendercoders:
1) if a script is developed outside of bf-extensions, like on github or
so, BF will only work as mirror at
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-extensions/extern/
1b) no real development would be allowed on bf-extensions/extern/.
    - BF would allow developers to make API changes fixes and trivial
fixes on bf-extensions/extern, but not more to avoid forking
    - externals devs should agree to port these fixes to their external repo
2) of course only GPL-compatible scripts would be distributable via
bf-extensions/extern/


With all these resctrictions and complications, I agree that this will
evolve into a package manager, so it's not that easy to do it quick and
dirty.

Our goal would be a system like the firefox addons site, but this is a
major feature and it has has server-side maintenance implications, so
it's not something you develop in blender only.


To avoid server-side implications, you should let blender download stuff
from wherever you want but according to the discussions we had back
then, I doubt BF will allow this on official releases.


Hope this has clarifies things a bit :)


Regards,
Luca