[ruuk]

I had a short chat with one of the team members responsible for addon submissions and it became clear that we wouldn't be able to sort out the binary addon issue until after Helix release, mostly because things are quite busy with the team right now. He suggested that we could put it into the official repository now with the NVDA binary library removed so that it wouldn't have to wait until the issue was settled.

I wanted to ask what you guys thought about that.

The NVDA backend could still be enabled by downloading the library and adding it to the addon. I would have to make a trivial code change to allow it to be put with the settings data so it doesn't get erased on version updates. I would probably make a windows installer to simplify installing the library. After Helix release, we can get this sorted out and get it back in after it's decided how to handle it.

Also, here's a little explanation about the basics behind the issue:

One of the policies that ensures that we can all trust Kodi to work as expected is that all the source code available for review. For addons this means that either they are python sources, or as in the case of PVR addons, compiled internally. Even though the NVDA binary is open source, it was not compiled by us, so it could technically have different code from the published source. No one here is worried that this is the case for the NVDA library, but we can't just ignore the policy, because we (the Team) are responsible to the users. So basically this just means either an adjustment to the policy needs to be made or the allowance of exceptions to it. In either case how it affects future such instances has to be considered.