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+--- Thread: Linux Add-on development-testing routine (/showthread.php?tid=151985)
Add-on development-testing routine - Passiday - 2013-01-14
I am a developer willing to give a try in writing my 1st XBMC plugin (Music add-on that would connect to a radio website that hosts 4 stations and archive) , and am a bit lost what are the best suggested development practices. I have pretty decent software development background and I am familiar with Python, so I need specifics, not general basics.
I have installed XBMC on RaspberryPi Wheezy.
So I landed in this page http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add-on_development and it seems it will serve for a good starting point. However, I'd like to know if it is ok that I just create a new folder (ie, "plugin.audio.my.test") in ~/.xbmc/addons , scramble up some minimal set of files, and hope that XBMC will respect this entity as a new add-on? I'd like to connect to this add-on location via ssh from my development computer, while having the XBMC running and displaying on my TV set. I'd expect that I can see the results immediately after I have updated my python code (or other add-on files like icon and xml config files), so that the development-testing cycle is as short as possible. So perhaps I have to take into account some caching/reloading issues on the XBMC side?
RE: Add-on development-testing routine - hippojay - 2013-01-14
That's pretty much how I do my addon development.
You don't need to "install" an addon to make it work - as long as it exists within the addon directory and has a correctly formatted addon.xml file, then XBMC will read it and use it. Any changes to the files within the addon are reflected immediately within XBMC when the addon is run - you only need to restart XBMC if you modify the addon.xml file.
This is the way I do my addon development. I have a git repository that sits in the addon folder, so a can modify, test, commit changes, branch and test new code without having to restart XBMC.
XBMC does sometimes cache views/listing, but this can be switched off in the python code. To be honest I rarely see this caching.
Re: Add-on development-testing routine - queeup - 2013-01-17
No need xbmc restart after change addon.xml. just check updates from xbmc from settings or use xbmc-send --action="UpdateLocalAddons" from terminal
RE: Add-on development-testing routine - Passiday - 2013-01-18
Great, thanks, this lightweight set-up gave ma courage to move on
