[Soc-2017-dev] Weekly Report #05 - Package Manager

[Ellwood Zwovic]

My report for week 5: 
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php?title=User:Gandalf3/GSoC_2017/Reports#Week_5

== Week 5 ==

What I did this week:

* Implemented basic asynchronous communication between blender and 
subprocesses.
* Added very basic repository fetching
* Wrote some documentation: 
https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BPMA/browse/master/README.md

=== Questions ===

Where should the local package list be stored? Is $BLENDER_USER_CONFIG a 
good place?

On a related note, should package files be kept around even after 
installation?
For instance, pacman keeps every package ever downloaded in 
/var/cache/pacman/pkg
This allows for fairly painless rollbacks, which is particularly helpful 
as the arch repositories don't keep old versions of packages around.
On the other hand, this can easily eat up disk space. Pacman provides 
tools for cleaning the cache up, but they must be manually invoked.

Does this approach seem appropriate for Blender?
Would it be better to clean up such a cache automatically? (e.g. 
deleting based on age, or by number of versions behind the current version)
Or would it be preferable to simply not keep a cache at all? (perhaps 
making it the repository's responsibility to keep old versions)

=== Plans for next week ===

Clean up and extend repository generation and fetching. Implement 
package fetching (continued from last week). Get started on real UI.


Ellwood