[Bf-committers] Blender App Central / Add-on Manager

[mindrones]

Hi.

RE: wiki
-------------------

It always amuses|depresses me when I hear talking like that about the wiki.

Not that I'm a mediawiki fanboy (and I mean it) but let's face it:
millions of people use Wikipedia to _communicate_, and I don't hear
them lament as much as I hear in the blender circles.

The wiki syntax is very simple and you hardly need to use deep/nerdy
stuff to express your idea or knowledge.

See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents#Editing to get going
(avoid the advanced section, you don't really need it to write simple
text).

Even if it was a bit more complex (and as you can see it's not) from
people that use Blender I'd expect it's a snap.

IMHO it has more to do with some people in these circles being (or
feeling :P) "artists" and hence having a natural sense of rejection
towards hierarchies/organization/structure and (oh my!) rules.
I can understand that, and writing documentation is boring and not
fun, but it's the act of documenting being boring, not the tool
per-se.

Long story short, IMHO it's just a pre-concept (or in many cases,
lazyness) stopping you from using the wiki.


RE: addons
-------------------

There has been discussion and a proposal for a similar project, see

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mindrones/Bf-extensions/External_addons

but for a lack of time it just didn't happened yet. Not perfect but
still I provide the link as a reference in case it can be useful.

Here again, I'm pretty much amused (but again also quite depressed)
when I hear people lamenting the current situation of bf-extensions
repository. Try to do a leap back to 3 years ago and you'll understand
what I mean.
Even if you were lucky enough to find the script you wanted in google,
you had to report bugs to the developer in mail or via forum, and the
fix was uploaded to some personal website or worst, on some sharing
site (which is the reason why we deleted all the external links from
scripts when we started): most of them were just broken.

So, again, IMHO it's just a pre-concept that things are so awful in
bf-extensions.

I don't like the idea of having separate repositories from the one in
BF svn, and pretending that they become "official" (distributed in or
through blender), for the simple reason that if you can put work into
those projects you could instead put effort in the BF repository
project, and help improve stuff, review scripts, provide patches,
gather people, explain some basic rules, spread the word, etc: it
would grow a lot faster and healthier.

Bf-extensions is not perfect, and yeah there are some rules, but they
have been decided based on common sense and they work well if, as said
in a previous mails, you want to share with the public.


Regards,
Luca