2013-11-24, 12:39
This is awesome. Great work guys!
I do have a few ideas about improving the workflow of developing and submitting addons and I'm not sure this is the right thread to discuss them (most probably not, but maybe someone will point me in the right direction where I can open a discussion).
The biggest pain for me right now when developing addons is the packaging of python library dependencies. For any addon which depends on quite a few external python libraries which are not already packaged for XBMC, the work required to package it for submission in the official repositories quickly adds up to quite a lot.
In order to do this you would have to either download all the required libraries and drop them in your addon directory, or package each and every library you depend on in a different XBMC addon (which requires significantly more work).
Both of these are quite inefficient and require a significant amount of work to prepare the initial submission and to keep the dependencies up-to-date.
Since most addons use libraries which are already found in the Python Package Index wouldn't it be possible to let XBMC download and install these dependencies automatically, preferably whit-in a virtualenv for each addon? Are there any security considerations which should be taken into consideration? Would it be feasible to implement this functionality into XBMC?
By having the dependency resolution implemented directly into XBMC and letting the addon developers only specify their dependencies in a requirements.txt would make our life as addon developers much easier.
What do you guys think?
I do have a few ideas about improving the workflow of developing and submitting addons and I'm not sure this is the right thread to discuss them (most probably not, but maybe someone will point me in the right direction where I can open a discussion).
The biggest pain for me right now when developing addons is the packaging of python library dependencies. For any addon which depends on quite a few external python libraries which are not already packaged for XBMC, the work required to package it for submission in the official repositories quickly adds up to quite a lot.
In order to do this you would have to either download all the required libraries and drop them in your addon directory, or package each and every library you depend on in a different XBMC addon (which requires significantly more work).
Both of these are quite inefficient and require a significant amount of work to prepare the initial submission and to keep the dependencies up-to-date.
Since most addons use libraries which are already found in the Python Package Index wouldn't it be possible to let XBMC download and install these dependencies automatically, preferably whit-in a virtualenv for each addon? Are there any security considerations which should be taken into consideration? Would it be feasible to implement this functionality into XBMC?
By having the dependency resolution implemented directly into XBMC and letting the addon developers only specify their dependencies in a requirements.txt would make our life as addon developers much easier.
What do you guys think?