[ronie]

DUE TO THE LACK OF INTEREST, THE DEV REPO IS CURRENTLY CLOSED

Kodi.tv Skin Development (beta/rc) repo


What is it:
The Skin Development Repository is a repo that will only contain skins that have entered the beta/rc stage but are not official repo ready.

Why:
Users usually need to pull the skin code from a online repository and install it through some workaround. This can limit the test userbase or creates some issues when they install it wrong.
Some skinners offer a repo by themselves where they push their release, however this requires some work from their side.
So to provide some help for our dedicated skinners and providing the userbase who are willing to live on the edge
a central point of helping to test nearly completed skins before they are added to Kodi.tv offcial repo we would like to offer the Skin Development repo.

To be clear this is in no way meant to replace offcial repo. This repo is merely a stepping stone with reduced guidelines before you feel ready to submit to offcial repo.


Guidelines:

• Skins do not need to be completely finished but should have all major skin dialogs coded
  
• Skin should be considered ready for beta testing.
  
• You need to regularly update your skin so it doesn't end up being stale for months.
  

You decide when you update the development repo, as we feel you need to be in control of when you see it fit for updating.
We would like you to update your skin at regular interval with minimum of once a month and a maximum of around once every week.
This to not burden you and us and to keep the skin alive.

Don't forget to bump the skin version version (Major.Minor.Patch) for each update.
You can choose to keep the your skin id or add .dev behind it. It's up to you.
Do note that not adding .dev behind the id is the wisest thing to do because it makes it easier for user to switch to the final stable version.


How:
Send us the same e-mail like you would do for the official repo but mentioning it is for the development repo.
Since there are no checks done, adding/updating should be done quite quickly.
Allowed: git/svn/zip pulls, just like the normal request.



Note:
If your skin is already in the official Kodi.tv addon repo,
you can also use the development repo to test the next release of your skin.

Note to users:
By installing this repo you may receive the latest development version of a skin which is available in this repo which may be newer than the one you installed from official repo and will update your current stable version. This excludes the ones with the "development version" tag behind it.


Current skins listed:
An up to date list of skins in the Frodo repo can be found here.
An up to date list of skins in the Gotham repo can be found here.

For help on these skins see their forum threads.

[Martijn]

We hope that by doing this we can help and aid you in making it easier and provide better support for everyone.

Do make it clear to users that by installing this repo they will also receive updates from other installed skins.

Enjoy

[Kib]

Can the staging repo zip be added to the normal repo ?
That way people can enable it without having to download it manually

[Martijn]

Can the staging repo zip be added to the normal repo ?
That way people can enable it without having to download it manually

First that would be against our own rules as we do not allow repos inside our repo
Second we don't want it to make too easy that the common user will install this as these are WIP skins and if something breaks they should at least have some knowledge of what to do. So by doing it as a manual zip install we preserve it to the somewhat more experienced users who also visit this forum and hopefully can provide better debug/test information to help the skinner improve his skin.
I think they rather have 10 "experienced"users than 100 new ones that will start asking "how can i provide proper information" each time they find something. Also this way WIP and official skins are clearly separated so by needing to install the repo manually you take the risk yourself.
We've seen it happening in the past time so from experience we found it better to do it this way.

[Kib]

Ok, might be cool for new skinners than, but once you have a repository somewhere with your skin in it it doesn't have much added value.

Just personally speaking here, I don't see the added benefit of this over the locations where Neon is now.
If it would make installs easier for casual testers I would benefit from moving the skin here, but this has the same complexity as the current solution..

[bossanova808]

It's once central spot where users can experiment with (and thus report back on) - a bunch of new, active in-development skins, without bothering to go get everyone's repo zip or much about with a repo-installer like Passion or whatever - jut grab one zip, once, and then hopefully all major developing skins will be accessible.

Seems very easy and logical to me and a nice separation between mainline and in-development

I presume you could then have 'Skin' and 'Skin Dev' installed simultaneously for testing and fallback to mainline when you jsut want to watch...presuming the skins have some sort of separate name designation in this repo.

Simple, handy.

[Balinus]

It's much easier to do it with this WIP repo than with your own repo. No need to psackage your skin in zip files or to change the addons.xml in your repo, etc... you just need to write a short email with your SVN (or GIT) pull request.

I tried both and I no longer update my repo.

[Martijn]

Updated skin list. See OP

[tripkip]

Great initiative! Thank you.

[mulat]

Amber skin works very fast on Raspberry Pi. I recommend Amber for all users of the RPI it worth to try

[hstegeman]

I read that amber has a new version 0.46, when will it be in the repo?
The current version 0.45 is allready very good, I am making use of it for one week.
This is a very nice skin, before a week I did make use of quartz.

[Martijn]

@skinners

Would there be interest in starting a Gotham dev repo for skins?
Do note there is still no release date planned or even known.
By starting a gotham repo you can start preparing/adapting your skin to the various changes which can be found in this thread

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=158812

[Martijn]

Announcement

In November we will be opening our Gotham skin repository and also our skin development repository.

So for the people who are confident that they are up-to-date according to "Changes to the skinning engine for XBMC Gotham" thread they can send a pull request through the usual method for adding the skin to the Gotham repo. As usual ronie will do the normal checks on the skin before adding it.
As this repo is standard included in Gotham build, users do not have to do anything.

So the ones who are still in development you can use the same method but mention that is for the development repository.
If your skin is included in this repository, users will need to download the new dev repo from **link to be inserted here** and install this manually.

For both be sure that you have gone through the "Changes to the skinning engine for XBMC Gotham" thread.

Note:
Make sure that the skin version you submit to Gotham is higher than the version in Frodo to ensure users will receive an update.

[Martijn]

for any skinner interested you can submit requests for adding to Gotham skin dev repo.

[senna99]

Hello

Who can explain to me, how to put my skin beta,
on wip repo.My skin is set to github, whether it is ok or not.