2013-10-15, 10:20
As already mentioned on github I don't really like the second option simply because it kind of defeats the purpose of XML. I know we use this approach already in addon.xml because it can easily be read by cpluff as a single tag/element and then parsed in some CAddon implementation. The disadvantage is that you can't really write a good XSD for it and it might not be obvious which "keywords" are available and valid.
Whatever approach is chosen I agree that this is something we need. It allows us to inform users about special or missing functionality in a skin before installing it. While we can't really know whether an installation only supports touch input or if there's also a keyboard attached we can tell the user before the activation of a skin that there might be a problem. Same goes for PVR support.
I will also needs something like this in plugins to be able to state if a plugin supports the import of plugin items into the local library.
Besides the question of how to write this in XML I'm also not sure about where to put it. The above examples only make sense for skins but not for scrapers, plugins etc. The stuff I'll need in the future for library import will only make sense for plugins but not for skins etc. So either it should go into the addon type specific extension point (which would allow the definition of very specific XSDs) or it goes into xmbc.addon.metadata and is just ignored for addon types where it doesn't make sense.
Whatever approach is chosen I agree that this is something we need. It allows us to inform users about special or missing functionality in a skin before installing it. While we can't really know whether an installation only supports touch input or if there's also a keyboard attached we can tell the user before the activation of a skin that there might be a problem. Same goes for PVR support.
I will also needs something like this in plugins to be able to state if a plugin supports the import of plugin items into the local library.
Besides the question of how to write this in XML I'm also not sure about where to put it. The above examples only make sense for skins but not for scrapers, plugins etc. The stuff I'll need in the future for library import will only make sense for plugins but not for skins etc. So either it should go into the addon type specific extension point (which would allow the definition of very specific XSDs) or it goes into xmbc.addon.metadata and is just ignored for addon types where it doesn't make sense.
