[stoli]

However, seriously, can I ask why are those add-ons are kept separated? Now I'm perfectly fine with setting up some standards to add-on acceptation but I most of the 3partly add-ons seams just fine. Only problem seams to be they are national (at least Czech ones are GPL and are working fine)? Doesn't they deserve a section in official repo? Are we supposed to follow wiki in order to know about them?

One example given was with skins that are a branch/mod of another that they did not want to create confusion (mcborzu's Night and my Neon being a specific example). Another was shear size. Some of the Aeon forks are well over 200Mb.

While I agree with these and other restrictions on the 'official' repo, it would be nice if some of the more popular 'unofficial' repos were included by default, even if with a disclaimer. The Passion-xbmc.org repo is a perfect example; they have been kind enough to add virtually all skins that are Dharma compatible to their repo.

Maybe, hopefully, something like this will happen in time...

[pecinko]

I think we will accept them eventually, was decided to wait a bit for it since we want addons to populate into our repos rather than them creating own repos. We want our repo to be big and hopefully what most users need, we want to minimize the amount of users actually even needing to enable a third party repo .

I'm sure many users will welcome this in oppose to look for them in different places.

Cheers, Peca

[pecinko]

One example given was with skins that are a branch/mod of another that they did not want to create confusion (mcborzu's Night and my Neon being a specific example). Another was shear size. Some of the Aeon forks are well over 200Mb.

Stoli, I really can not comment on mods. Line that separates new skins and mods is not always easily recognized. OTOH, Aeon really should be there as a skin that significantly marked one period in XBMC's life and greatly helped increasing it's popularity. It's more than 200MB - so what If you like that kind of a skin it's worth waiting a while to download it.

Maybe, hopefully, something like this will happen in time...

We can only hope. Maybe we could start with clearly stating the rules for the official AppStore.

[theuni]

We discussed Aeon on the list, and we left it up to the Aeon65 author how to proceed. Yes, we don't want 5 versions of something very similar in the repo. Yes, we don't want 200mb skins in the repo.

Stoli is a great example of someone doing things right. He submitted "Neon", and it had a few problems. It was HUGE, and he slimmed it down. Secondly, I asked him if he thought of it as a mod, or a skin. He basically said "it's still a mod, but in time it will be a skin of its own". Very similar to Transparency!. So when he's ready, we'll pull it in.

As for 3rd party repos in our repo, we'll do this eventually. But we wanted the xbmc.org repo to be established well enough as the "main" repo first. Think about it.. if everyone just bypassed it and went to a 3rd party, there would be no central repo with good standards and quality control. It's very similar to the debian/ubuntu model. It just needs some time to be established.

TheUni

[ronie]

Yes, we don't want 200mb skins in the repo.

i've seen you mentioning this few times and i'm wondering....why?

is bandwidth costs the main reason, or....?

[pecinko]

Think about it.. if everyone just bypassed it and went to a 3rd party, there would be no central repo with good standards and quality control. It's very similar to the debian/ubuntu model. It just needs some time to be established.

On the contrary, I'm saying that there's no need for stuff to be in a 3party repos, except for adults and "hacks".

I do understand that you don't want 200MB skins, it's just that I don't understand WHY. Since I'm trying to make one, what's the biggest size of a skin you'll be willing to accept to AppStore?

As for the Ubuntu/Debian model - even the last Ubuntu is making Nvidia unsupported restricted drivers available through a click.

[pecinko]

is bandwidth costs the main reason, or....?

It's a matter of add-ons implementation of course, but it's not mandatory for a skin to reside on XBMC server, as log as I'm provided with proper URL XBMC could fetch it from, say, SourceForge. Same way XBMC isn't hosting posters or fanart but knows where to find them. But I think we do need as many as possible stuff at least listed in main repo.

[Arcanthur]

Another need for 3rd Party / Unofficial Repos are due to Skins and the like that use Fonts or other assets that are NOT rights free.

My personal skin Fusion uses a couple of fonts that have this issue and thus it can NEVER be included into the official repo. A sad situation, but I'm not willing to change the font to something that doesn't match the vision of the skin.

This is also another reason AEON was never official, remember having to download the fonts separately at one point?

This gives a perfect example of the need for 3rd Party Repos.