[ronie]

First reason, for me is a total loss of control on my stuff. Actually the official Frodo repo of XBMC is providing the version 1.7.6 of Advanced Launcher that do not works at all with Frodo. I have never submit this version for Frodo (only for Eden) but it is there. I have asked (more than 3 months ago) to remove this version of Advanced Launcher from the Frodo repo (or declare it as broken)... but nothing have been done yet. Really frustrating.

cheers for the feedback Angelscry!

when we opened the frodo addon repo, we did indeed move most of the addons from the eden repo to the frodo one.
this was done with the best intentions: to save all addon maintainers the trouble of having to submit their addon again for frodo.

we tried to filter out the incompatible ones as best as we could, but obviously we've missed some.
apologies if our efforts to save you all some work caused more trouble than it did good.

your addon has been marked as broken now. ;-)

The second reason, is that actually a same version of Advanced Launcher is compatible with Dharma, Eden and Frodo versions of XBMC. So implies that the Advanced Launcher contains code parts that are only compatible with some versions of XBMC, even if these code parts are only executed on the version of XBMC they are compatible with (by using a simple python test). So it breaks one of the repo rules. It was told me that it was not possible to host the add-on in state and that it will be better to provide different version of Advanced Launcher (1 for each version of XBMC) with a different version number for each. You lost me at this time...

yup, i think that's the biggest hurdle for most of the addon creators.
the addon system we introduced in dharma had it's initial issues,
we've been addressing those over the last two years.

on top of that we've made a lot of changes to the python engine
and our json-rpc interface, both breaking backward compatibility for many addons.

i realize with each xbmc release we promise this was the last time we will break backwards compatibility
and starting with the next version of xbmc you won't have to go through the hassle of submitting a new
version of your addon, specific to this release, again.

i'm sorry we haven't been able to keep that promise...
but we're trying hard, really hard.

in retrospect, i think it just takes a bit of time with each new feature in xbmc
to get it into the right shape, stable and optimized.