[ronie]

The first thing that is not very clear is if my plugins are acceptable for the official repo. The following sentences are a bit vague: "All files must be free and legal to distribute. The add-on must not violate any known copyright laws - if in doubt, let us know and we'll look into it for you. " . I imagine that some developers would not spend their time asking (and BTW where should they ask?).

i'll try to shed some light in the darkness then :-)

legal and free to distribute:
- first and foremost it means you release your work as open source, this should be done by including a license file in your addon
- second, you can't include the work of others if it's copyrighted. things like copyrighted fonts or artwork are examples of this

not violate copyright laws:
- the so called 'piracy addons'. add-ons that link directly to pirated content and enables the user to access that content through the add-on aren't allowed

when i doubt, just ask either on the addon mailing list or in our python development forum

I really think the way to push an update to the official repo is too cumbersome. It should be as easy as to making a git push. You should trust your plugin developers otherwise they will go away and they'll start their own repo.

If you want to check their code quality (a good think IMHO), it could be a good idea to have a peer review process before the developer can push his plugin to the official repository, like it is done in many Linux distributions for RPM and DEB packages.

code review is something we value very much. a large part of xbmc development is also done this way.
i'd like to stress it has nothing to do with mistrusting anyone, it is nothing more than just an extra pair of eyes on the code
to try to filter out any silly errors (which we all make at times, we're only human after all).

as for making the submission process easier, spiff explained things a bit here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1336938

If you do not want developers to submit too frequent updates you should create an unstable repo, where the developers can push their updates as often as they write code and early adopters can test them and provide feedback before pushing to the stable repo. For example without testers I couldn't find a blocker issue affecting two of my plugins on Android and ATV, platforms I don't own and I rarely have access to.

personally i never thought there was a need for it, but to my surprise quite a few have brought up this idea.
it's certainly something we should discus to see if we can make it happen.

And last but not least, you should also have some kind of bug reporting feature (bugzilla, trac, whatever) for the addons in the official repo. It's not easy for a developer to track the bugs reported in the forums.

noted. will add this idea to the list on the first post.