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What are the reasons you don't submit your addon to official repo?
#16
This is a little unrelated, but a couple of responses have talked about the value of the email list for informing others what's going on. For me, that is not the case because the volume of emails that have almost no relevance to me is so large that I finally just filtered them all into a folder and mark them as read automatically. So the only time I check the list is if I have submitted an update for an add-on. I use the forums for information gathering and dissemination.

For instance, I just saw the forum post about additional options in addon.xml and how to do multiple authors. If that was posted to the list, I never saw it because of my choice to filter stuff.
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#17
(2013-02-15, 21:45)pkscuot Wrote: This is a little unrelated, but a couple of responses have talked about the value of the email list for informing others what's going on. For me, that is not the case because the volume of emails that have almost no relevance to me is so large that I finally just filtered them all into a folder and mark them as read automatically. So the only time I check the list is if I have submitted an update for an add-on. I use the forums for information gathering and dissemination.

For instance, I just saw the forum post about additional options in addon.xml and how to do multiple authors. If that was posted to the list, I never saw it because of my choice to filter stuff.

That's what i found out form experience. Possibly we'll be linking add-on submission by the forum user account. More direct contact and notification will can be be more directed and we still can do feedback
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#18
I'd love to use xbmc.org but I haven't added my x-new addon to xbmc repo.yet. Some reasons

- the once a month rule is too rigid
- I have to maintain a beta repo with daily update anyway,
- my plugin supports Eden and Frodo so I have to update two repos
- I started in Sept. so a Frodo repo wasn't viable and python wasn't even working correctly until then
- Uncertainties over what to do with repos for Frodo+ or 12.1 or whatever it will be called.

A big one is users don't ask, and install from zip works well.

Martin
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#19
(2013-02-16, 02:56)emveepee Wrote: I'd love to use xbmc.org but I haven't added my x-new addon to xbmc repo.yet. Some reasons

- the once a month rule is too rigid
- I have to maintain a beta repo with daily update anyway,
- my plugin supports Eden and Frodo so I have to update two repos
- I started in Sept. so a Frodo repo wasn't viable and python wasn't even working correctly until then
- Uncertainties over what to do with repos for Frodo+ or 12.1 or whatever it will be called.

A big one is users don't ask, and install from zip works well.

Martin
cheers for your feedback emveepee!

what would you consider to be a good interval between updates?
the reason it's currently 'one month' is two fold:
- frequent updates will become quite annoying, especially if you've installed a lot of addons
- why would no you need to update frequently... is it to fix bugs or something specific to your addon (i'm not familiar with x-new)

as for the users don't ask, keep in mind a large part of the xbmc users will never visit our forum
and therefore not even know of your addon. having it in the addon repo will expose it to all xbmc users.
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#20
I did a check and did 35 major and minor releases in 5 months. It was a mix of bugs, xbmc workarounds, changes for json, new functions, better understanding of python, changes in server web services.

Since my addon x-newa is linked to a PVR it doesn't work to have general exposure so perhaps I am not the best use case for the repo.

Martin
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#21
I have no problem with the mailing list for submissions, I understand the need for manual code review before a pull. However, I wouldn't mind two mailing lists, as pkscuot mentioned. One for submissions and one for important announcements / dev issues. Currently the volume is so large that I mostly ignore them.
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#22
(2013-02-16, 07:07)emveepee Wrote: I did a check and did 35 major and minor releases in 5 months. It was a mix of bugs, xbmc workarounds, changes for json, new functions, better understanding of python, changes in server web services.

Since my addon x-newa is linked to a PVR it doesn't work to have general exposure so perhaps I am not the best use case for the repo.

Martin

Lets say you want to create another add-on. Would it also require 35 update? I dont think so since you now have learned a great deal and probably dont make the same mistakes twice. Its normal that the first one takes way more time.
A month is guideline to make sure you're not sending updates to often. Surely if the site you use changes or you find a large bug that had gone unnoticed doing an update request is not problem however this should not be every week or so.
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#23
It depends on the complexity, a shoutcast api player might require minimal updates but workarounds temporary glitches and api changes will change that. In my case now that I know python better especially all the utf-8 gotchas I had to deal with would probably save me 20% but I still can't say I understand skinning well enough.t When I add a 1080 skin it won't cause a few updates which will come in spurts. I can't possibly test all the skins and when someone tells me they can't see my skins running Aeon Nox white that is a prod change.

Martin
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#24
Note that the one month update is really to make sure that you get it right first time. i.e. if it's a bugfix and you're completely sure about it, then I'm sure a faster update period might be appropriate. The main thing we want to eliminate is the "fixed x,y,z", "really fixed y", "fixing y broke b", "z wasn't actually fixed" type cycles. It's better for users if the add-on is broken for a couple of days while things are fixed properly.

Ofcourse, the potential downside is you may not know if your fix really fixed it and didn't break other stuff without lots of users getting that fix.

I can see the use of a "testing" style repository to help solve this second issue (or at least make it easier for users to deal with this). You'd need to stick with good versioning ofcourse to make sure everything worked nicely. Also, atm there's no way for the user to say "use repo foo for add-on bar, but use the main repo for all the rest of the add-ons. i.e. if we had a testing repository, the user would get ALL add-ons in testing that they have installed, regardless of whether they want to test that add-on. Needs more thought.

Cheers,
Jonathan
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#25
Just another example to confirm the fact that is is REALLY frustrating for developpers do not have any control on their stuff :

(2013-02-15, 00:34)ronie Wrote: your addon has been marked as broken now. ;-)

And I have receive this yesterday from a user : http://www.gwenael.org/forum/viewtopic.p...1680#p1680

After checking the XBMC official repo (for Frodo), the version 1.7.6 of Advanced Launcher has not been marked has broken but replaced by the version 1.7.7 (maybe the last version I have tried to submit in February last year and which is of course not compatible with Frodo). Consequence, the user have been redirected to MY Repo (and will surely never use again the XBMC official repo to download Advanced Launcher). Undecided
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#26
(2013-02-17, 15:15)Angelscry Wrote: Just another example to confirm the fact that is is REALLY frustrating for developpers do not have any control on their stuff :

(2013-02-15, 00:34)ronie Wrote: your addon has been marked as broken now. ;-)

And I have receive this yesterday from a user : http://www.gwenael.org/forum/viewtopic.p...1680#p1680

After checking the XBMC official repo (for Frodo), the version 1.7.6 of Advanced Launcher has not been marked has broken but replaced by the version 1.7.7 (maybe the last version I have tried to submit in February last year and which is of course not compatible with Frodo). Consequence, the user have been redirected to MY Repo (and will surely never use again the XBMC official repo to download Advanced Launcher). Undecided

cheers for the heads-up mate!

we misplaced broken tag in addon.xml, hence it didn't work.
will fix it right away.
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#27
I personally thinks the strict rules that you apply !

if the plugin works it works without officials picking it apart for you to then do more work to abide by your rules !

hence its easier having your own repo
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#28
I think most of the current process is already working well. Submitting my addons to the list and monitoring submissions of other authors already helped me to get useful feedback about "API" changes that I may have missed otherwise. Another big plus is the new transifex service.

The most important issue that I could have with adding my addons to the official repo is what Angelscry already mentioned: not being allowed to support different XBMC versions in the same branch. In this point I think we should differentiate between static files (addon.xml, changelog.txt, ...) and code files.

static files:
If there are changes required in static files (like the versioning change from Eden to Frodo) it is necessary for us to submit two different versions of our addons. In my case I create two tags of the same codebase and just make some manual changes before I send my pull request to the mailing list. This is no big deal but still a bit error-prone.

Maybe we could have a versioning of these files like you already do with the databases. Allowing different versions of these static files being shipped with our addons (addon-12.xml, addon-13.xml, changelog-12.xml, ...)

code files:
In code files it is easy for us to reflect API changes in the code. We could use if/else or even try/except if we want to make sure that our addon is compatible with different versions of XBMC. In my oppinion this approach is easier than maintaining and merging different branches (especially in a hobby project). It would be nice if it could be officially allowed to work like this. I already have some of these constructs in my addons and until now I had no trouble with submitting them to the repo. Not sure if I have just been lucky that it slipped through like this (I hope this does not change from now onSmile).


About dedicated testing repo:
Although I like the idea I don't think this is absolutely necessary and like jmarshall already stated most users only want to have a test version of their 1-2 favorite addons and don't want to be the guinea pig for every addon dev. If something like this should happen it must be possible to decide what addons should be used from the testing repo. On the other hand every addon dev should be able to create zip files or repos with test versions and provide them in the support thread of the addon. For me this has been the best way to test new releases together with the users and most bugs have been reported before I submitted a new version to the official repo.
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#29
(2013-02-19, 15:50)mikey1234 Wrote: I personally thinks the strict rules that you apply !

if the plugin works it works without officials picking it apart for you to then do more work to abide by your rules !

any rules in particular you feel we can drop?
apart from the versioning stuff, which is obviously in pita for everyone.
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#30
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the plan to allow same revision in both eden and frodo this time around? But then someone decided to change the version scheme and it all went to hell?
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