[Bf-python] Support listing of multiple versions of the same addon

[Clemens Barth]

Dear Nathan.

I think that this is a very, very good proposition!

I have some colleagues, who also work with the /Atomic Blender addons/ 
[1] (import/export of PDB and XYZ files).
When there is a very new version from my side and my colleagues want to 
use this version, it mostly ends
up in a Team Viewer session: I manually replace the Python files in the 
main Blender directory via
overwriting the old version - work done in a shell, which my colleagues 
cannot do due to a lack of shell
knowledge. All this is quite time consuming ... .
Note that an existing addon (from trunc and I think also from contrib) 
cannot be replaced by manually installing
the same addon via the preferences (we tried a couple of times without 
any success).

So, if Blender allows installing one and the same addon several times 
and shows all different versions it would
help a lot: the user can then use the preferences and manually install a 
new version of the addon himself. After,
he decides, which version he wants to use (only one version).

Regards,

Clemens.

[1] Atomic Blender:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/PDB
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/XYZ



> A topic that has come up over on bf-committers is the possibility of 
> supporting multiple co-installed versions of the same addon, without 
> it showing up as a conflict in the addon browser.
>
> Consider the following use-cases:
>
> 1. A Blender user makes heavy use of an external renderer.  For their 
> professional work, they prefer to stick with an older tried-and-true 
> stable version, but for personal experimentation they want to play 
> with the latest bleeding-edge development version.  They wish to 
> install the addons for both versions of the renderer, and enable 
> different versions of the addon depending on whether a project is 
> personal or professional.
>
> 2. An animation studio is making their own custom changes to an 
> officially supported addon, but wish to have both the original 
> supported version and their own custom version available while their 
> changes are still unstable and untested.
>
> I think a fairly straight-forward way to support this from the user 
> perspective is simply to distinguish addons based on the version 
> number, allowing the listing of multiple co-installed versions of an 
> addon as long as the version number is different.  Maybe that's a bit 
> naive, though.  I'm not entirely sure what back-end changes are needed 
> to support this.
>
> --Nathan
>
>
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